COMPREHENSIVE RESEARCH

AND STUDY GUIDE

Samuel T.
Coleridge
BLOOM’S
M A J O R

POETS
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY HAROLD BLOOM
 C U R R E NTLY AVAI LAB LE

BLOOM’S MAJOR BLOOM’S MAJOR

SHORT STORY WORLD POETS
WRITERS Maya Angelou
Anton Chekhov Robert Browning
Joseph Conrad Geoffrey Chaucer
Stephen Crane Samuel T. Coleridge
William Faulkner Dante
F. Scott Fitzgerald Emily Dickinson
Nathaniel Hawthorne John Donne
Ernest Hemingway T. S. Eliot
O. Henry Robert Frost
Shirley Jackson Homer
Henry James Langston Hughes
James Joyce John Keats
D. H. Lawrence John Milton
Jack London Sylvia Plath
Herman Melville Edgar Allan Poe
Flannery O’Connor Poets of World War I
Edgar Allan Poe Shakespeare’s Poems
Katherine Anne Porter & Sonnets
J. D. Salinger Percy Shelley
John Steinbeck Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Mark Twain Walt Whitman
John Updike William Wordsworth
Eudora Welty William Butler Yeats
COMPREHENSIVE RESEARCH
AND STUDY GUIDE

Samuel T.
Coleridge

BLOOM’S
M A J O R

POETS
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY HAROLD BLOOM
Bloom’s Major Poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Copyright © 2001 by Infobase Publishing

Introduction © 2001 by Harold Bloom

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge / edited by Harold Bloom
p. cm. — (Bloom’s major poets)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-5933-2 (alk. paper)
1. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series.
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 Contents
User’s Guide 7
Editor’s Note 8
Introduction 9
Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 11

Thematic Analysis of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 15

Critical Views on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 22
Maud Bodkin on the Emotional Effects of the Poem 22
Peter Kitson on the Influence of the French Revolution 24
John T. Netland on the Roles of the Wedding-Guest and the Editor 27
Sarah Webster Goodwin on the Wedding Ceremony 30
Morse Peckham on the Poem as a Voyage of Discovery 33
H. R. Rookmaaker Jr. on Humanity’s Relationship with Nature 35

Thematic Analysis of “Frost at Midnight” 38

Critical Views on “Frost at Midnight” 42
James K. Chandler on Wordsworth’s Understanding of Coleridge 42
Mary Jacobus on the Continuity of the Imagination 45
Paul Magnuson on the Poem’s Political Context 48
Jarrold E. Hogle on the Poem’s Gothic Elements 51
Jonathan Bate on Political Themes Within the Poem 54

Thematic Analysis of “Christabel” 58

Critical Views on “Christabel” 63
Dennis M. Welch on the Theme of Incest in the Poem 63
Margery Durham on Christabel’s Ambiguity 65
Avery F. Gaskins on the Poem as Both a Verse Drama and a Gothic Parody 68
Rosemary Ashton on Coleridge’s Indecisiveness in Regards to Geraldine 71
Jennifer Ford on Christabel’s Disturbed Sleep 74

Thematic Analysis of “Dejection: An Ode” 79

Critical Views on “Dejection: An Ode” 84
John Spencer Hill on Classical and English Ode Traditions 84
Harold Bloom on Continuity in the Poem 87
Reeve Parker on the Poem’s Formal Elements in Relation to Its Intention 90
Susan Militzer Luther on Interpreting the Poem 92
Tilottama Rajan on the Poem’s Ambiguity 95
Thematic Analysis of “Kubla Khan” 98
Critical Views on “Kubla Khan” 101
Anthony John Harding on Coleridge’s Mythmaking 101
Carl R. Woodring on the Poem’s Political Context 103
David Perkins on the Unity Between the Prose Preface and the Poem 105
Claire Miller Colombo on Poetic Form 108
Kathleen Wheeler on the Poem’s Relation to 18th-Century Garden
Concepts 110

Works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 114

Works about Samuel Taylor Coleridge 115
Index of Themes and Ideas 118

6
 User’s Guide
This volume is designed to present biographical, critical, and
bibliographical information on the author’s best-known or most
important poems. Following Harold Bloom’s editor’s note and
introduction is a detailed biography of the author, discussing major life
events and important literary accomplishments. A thematic and
structural analysis of each poem follows, tracing significant themes,
patterns, and motifs in the work.
A selection of critical extracts, derived from previously published
material from leading critics, analyzes aspects of each poem. The
extracts consist of statements from the author, if available, early reviews
of the work, and later evaluations up to the present. A bibliography of
the author’s writings (including a complete list of all books written,
cowritten, edited, and translated), a list of additional books and articles
on the author and the work, and an index of themes and ideas in the
author’s writings conclude the volume.

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University
and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the New York
University Graduate School. He is the author of over 20 books,
including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961),
Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975),
Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism
(1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and
Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection
(1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s
provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers
and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The
Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist, and How
to Read and Why, which was published in 2000.
Professor Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1955 and has
served on the Yale faculty since then. He is a 1985 MacArthur
Foundation Award recipient, served as the Charles Eliot Norton
Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1987–88, and has received
honorary degrees from the universities of Rome and Bologna. In 1999,
Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts
and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism.
Currently, Harold Bloom is the editor of numerous Chelsea House
volumes of literary criticism, including the series B LOOM ’ S N OTES ,
B LOOM ’ S M AJOR D RAMATISTS , B LOOM ’ S M AJOR N OVELISTS , M AJOR
L ITERARY C HARACTERS , M ODERN C RITICAL V IEWS , M ODERN C RITICAL
INTERPRETATIONS, and WOMEN WRITERS OF ENGLISH AND THEIR WORKS.

7
 Editor’s Note
My Introduction centers upon “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” stressing Coleridge’s fears about his own creative
powers.
Of the more than two dozen Critical Views, I find particularly
useful Morse Peckham on “The Ancient Mariner,” and Paul
Magnuson on “Frost at Midnight.”
I commend also Rosemary Ashton on “Christabel” and Reeve
Parker on “Dejection: An Ode.”
“Kubla Khan” is illuminated by David Perkins and by Kathleen
Wheeler. But all of the excerpts, on all five poems, offer
distinguished insights.

8
 Introduction
HAROLD BLOOM

Coleridge had the dark fortune of being eclipsed by his best friend,
William Wordsworth. What we think of as modern poetry is
Wordsworthianism, the evanescence of any poetic subject except for
the poet’s own subjectivity. Two years younger than Wordsworth,
Coleridge actually invented what was to be the Wordsworthian
mode in such early poems as “The Eolian Harp” (1795) and “Frost at
Midnight” (1798), the immediate precursors of Wordsworth’s
“Tintern Abbey” (written later in 1798). But Coleridge had an
almost Kafkan sense of guilt and of self-abnegation. He became
Wordsworth’s follower, enhancing their joint volume, Lyrical Ballads
(1798) with his magnificent The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Since
the two parts of Christabel were composed in 1798 and 1800, “Kubla
Khan” around 1798, and “Dejection: An Ode” in 1802, Coleridge’s
crucial poetic achievement is pretty much the work of four years,
and essentially ended when he was 30. When one considers how
unique and original Coleridge’s poetic endowment was, it is a great
sorrow that only a few fragments attest to his gift after 1802.
Perhaps Coleridge’s greatest achievement, like Emerson’s after
him, was in his notebooks, which afford an extraordinary image of
his complex and restless mind. Yet, for the common reader,
Coleridge is no longer the Sage of Highgate, but the author of a few
absolute poems, “Kubla Khan,” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
in particular. Coleridge had projected an epic on the fall of
Jerusalem to the Romans (A.D. 70), and rather wonderfully “Kubla
Khan” somehow issued from that outrageous ambition. No reader
could know this from chanting the gorgeous fragment, which should
be memorized and indeed recited aloud. But this foreground helps
explain the sense of “holy dread” in “Kubla Khan,” and its general
atmosphere of potential profanation.
The hidden theme of “Kubla Khan” appears to be Coleridge’s fear
of his own genius, his own daemonic powers. The poem’s genre is
what William Collins, following John Milton, established in his “Ode
on the Incarnation of the Poetical Character.” There a new Apollo, a
“rich-haired youth of morn,” is manifested in the guise of the post-
Miltonic, pre-Romantic Bard of Sensibility, a direct ancestor of

9
William Blake as well as of Coleridge. “Kubla Khan” concludes with
a vision of a youth with flashing eyes and floating hair, who has
found his way back to an unfallen existence, where he has drunk “the
milk of Paradise.” This youth is the poet that Coleridge both longed
and feared to become, the celebrant of a new imaginative power, one
that would repair the fall not only of Jerusalem but of Man.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, so frequently interpreted as a
Christian parable of the Fall of Man, instead is a phantasmagoria of
the unlived life, one so compulsive that the poem never will know
(nor can we) why gratuitous crimes and gratuitous releases should
take place. Whereas the Christian Fall results from an act of
disobedience, the Ancient Mariner simply acts, without willing and
yet with terrible consequences. As I read this great ballad, it is a
poem of the Imagination’s revenge upon those who live in a world
without Imagination. Coleridge rightly said that it had no true
moral, and indeed should have had no moral at all. Instead, it offers
a visionary cosmos as compelling as that in Kafka’s stories and
parables. Coleridge, like Kafka, makes his work uninterpretable, but
in turn the matter for interpretation becomes just that movement
away from interpretability. Kafka gives us a New Kabbalah, and so
does Coleridge. The cosmos of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is
not sacramental but Gnostic; the divinity is estranged or hidden, and
we find ourselves in the emptiness the ancient Gnostics called the
Kenoma. There we wander, there we weep, unless we suffer the
ultimate, compulsive fate of the Ancient Mariner, who ends as a
haunter of wedding feasts, always retelling his own story, in a kind of
parody of ecological wisdom.
We can surmise that the two extreme figures of Coleridge’s bipolar
vision are the youth of “Kubla Khan” and the Ancient Mariner.
Perhaps they are caught in a perpetual cycle together, in which at last
the newly incarnated Poetic character must age into a
fundamentalist of what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination.
That is “primary” only in being initial; otherwise it is repetition,
unlike the secondary or higher imagination that has drunk the milk
of Paradise, with consequences immediately ecstatic but finally
catastrophic. 

10
 Biography of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772. His father, the Reverend
John Coleridge, was a distinguished classical and Hebrew scholar
who held the prestigious position of headmaster of the King’s School
at Ottery St. Mary. By all accounts his mother, Ann Bowdon
Coleridge, was cold, detached, and ambitious. In Coleridge’s
accounts of childhood, he scarcely mentions his mother, though in
his poetry he writes poignantly and movingly about young children,
especially of the infant’s need for a mother’s love. Coleridge did,
however, identify strongly and lovingly with his eccentric father, a
man who has been described as scholarly and absent-minded,
oblivious of his dress and appearance. As an adult, Coleridge
adopted many of his father’s characteristics; those who knew
Coleridge remarked that his own slovenly appearance was in sharp
contrast to his brilliance and eloquence.
As a young boy, Coleridge was dreamy and precocious; he was an
avid reader from a very early age. In an October 1797 letter,
Coleridge told Thomas Poole, “[I] read every book that came in my
way without distinction.” He was also very lonely; perhaps his books
served to keep him company.
When Coleridge’s father died in 1781, the youth moved into a
much smaller house with his mother and sister. Shortly thereafter, a
friend of Coleridge’s father, Judge Buller, arranged for the young
man to enter Christ’s Hospital school, a famous boarding school in
London where the sons of poor gentry received an excellent
preparatory education. Coleridge began his studies there in
September 1782. One of Coleridge’s schoolmates at Christ’s Hospital
was Charles Lamb, who would go on to a career as an essayist and
critic; Coleridge and Lamb became lifelong friends.
Toward the end of his term at Christ’s Hospital school, Coleridge
began to take an interest in political affairs. The French Revolution
had taken place in 1789, and like many other students, he was
enthusiastic about the promise of social and political revolution in
France. Replacing that country’s monarchy, Coleridge felt, would
bring about reforms and social equality. He anticipated a republican
system of government, in which leaders are elected by citizens, all of

11
whom have an equal say, as a far better form of government than the
monarchy.
In the fall of 1791 Coleridge entered Cambridge University, which
at the time was the academic center of reform activity in England.
Within the academic environment, Coleridge’s views became
increasingly radical. One of his most influential friends was William
Frend, a fellow student who left the Church of England and declared
himself to be Unitarian, a Protestant sect not recognized in England.
When Frend stood trial for publishing a pamphlet advocating
freedom for religious dissenters to hold government jobs, Coleridge
was one of the noisy students seated in the gallery in his support.
Their presence accomplished little, however; Frend was found guilty
and expelled from Cambridge.
For Coleridge, the Cambridge years were also a time of dissolution
and financial hardship. He began visiting prostitutes, drinking
heavily, and taking opium. These habits led to tremendous debts. In
1793, in an act of desperation, Coleridge enlisted in a military
regiment under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. He joined
His Majesty’s Fifteenth Light Dragoons, so that he would have food
and a place to stay, but he proved to be a very poor horseman. As a
result, his military service consisted mostly of nursing a fellow
soldier with smallpox and writing letters to the wives and
sweethearts of other soldiers. His time in the Light Dragoons was
brief; Coleridge’s brother James and his friends Charles Valentine
LeGrice and Robert Allen intervened to help him get out of the
military. Though at first the army insisted on finding a substitute
before they would discharge Coleridge, eventually Coleridge’s
commanding officer accepted his plea of insanity.
Although Coleridge returned to Cambridge, he left in 1794
without a degree. Around this time, he met the poet Robert Southey,
a fellow radical who would have an enormous influence on
Coleridge. Together, the two young men planned to establish a
utopian democratic community in America, which would be
governed by what Coleridge termed “Pantisocracy”—equal rule by
all. An American real-estate agent convinced them to locate their
proposed community along the banks of the Susquehanna River in
Pennsylvania. Coleridge’s commitment to this plan was great
enough for him to marry Sara Fricker (the sister of Southey’s
financier), but the community never materialized.

12
 Though Coleridge and Sara were not well-matched, their
marriage was at first a happy one, despite their financial troubles. In
1796, a year after the marriage, Coleridge published a political
magazine, The Watchman, but it folded after just 10 issues. Coleridge
was rescued from debt by Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, the sons
of the famous pottery’s founder. They granted Coleridge an annuity
of 150 pounds so he could pursue his literary career.
Coleridge had met the poet William Wordsworth in 1795, and in
1797 the Coleridges moved to Nether Stowey in England’s Lake
District to be near Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. This move
initiated a period of close communication and poetic collaboration
between the two poets that culminated in their volume of poetry,
Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798. Lyrical Ballads was the first
important English publication of what came to be termed
“romantic” poetry. Coleridge’s major contribution was his long
poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He also wrote the poem
“Frost at Midnight,” as well as the fragment “Kubla Khan,” around
this time; the latter is considered one of his most enduring poetic
achievements, although it would not be published for nearly 20
years. The first part of Christabel was also written in 1798.
After the publication of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge toured
Germany and studied at Göttingen University, beginning a lifetime
study of German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. As a result,
he rethought his position on philosophy, religion, and literature.
When he returned to England in 1799, Coleridge’s marriage was
failing. His romantic attention focused now on Sara Hutchinson,
whose sister Mary would later become William Wordsworth’s wife.
By 1802, the year in which Coleridge’s daughter Sara was born, he
was estranged from his wife and spent very little time at home. His
health was declining as well, thanks to the cool, damp climate of the
Lake District, and he took opium to relieve his symptoms. This led
to addiction.
The second edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1800; this
edition contained a preface by Wordsworth that explained his theory
of poetry. The preface to Lyrical Ballads would become a guide to
other Romantic poets of the early 19th century. Coleridge,
meanwhile, wrote the second part of Christabel in 1800 and wrote
“Dejection: An Ode” in 1802.

13
 Coleridge embarked on a walking tour of Scotland with William
and Dorothy Wordsworth in August 1803. The tour was not a
success, and Coleridge separated from the others and pursued the
tour alone. This resulted in a cooled relationship between the two
poets. In 1804, shortly after his return from Scotland, Coleridge set
out for the Mediterranean island of Malta, hoping to restore his
health.
The six-week trip to Malta was a difficult one, and Coleridge
suffered bouts of seasickness. When he arrived at last, he prayed for
spiritual and physical aid; however, the notebooks he kept in Malta
indicate he was able to shake neither his physical illness nor his
opium habit during the time he was there. The notebooks also
document a period of painful self-analysis. He returned home before
Christmas 1806 a broken man—hopelessly addicted to opium,
subject to horrifying nightmares, and permanently estranged from
his wife.
Coleridge wrote little poetry after 1802; instead, he established
himself as one of England’s foremost literary critics. Between 1808
and 1819, Coleridge gave seven series of brilliant lectures on
Shakespeare; he included most of these in his Biographica Literaria
(1817), an important two-volume collection of critical essays.
His opium addiction continued unchecked; in 1816 Coleridge
confessed to Byron his daily habit of swallowing enormous doses of
the drug. Finally, he took up residence with a London doctor, James
Gillman, so that his opium consumption could be medically
supervised. By all accounts, Dr. Gillman was a patient and kindly
man; during his stay with the Gillman family, Coleridge finally
found happiness and tranquility. He remained with them for the rest
of his life.
In his last years, Coleridge was entirely absorbed in studying
philosophy and religion. When he died in 1834, he had finally
achieved peace of mind and had reconciled with both his wife and
the Wordsworths. The brilliant poet-critic will forever be
remembered as a man of powerful imaginative vision. 

14
 Thematic Analysis of
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Written in 1797 and first published in 1798, “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” has been interpreted as both a tale of the
supernatural, in the Gothic tradition of superstition, magic spells,
gloomy atmosphere, and treacherous journeys, and a religious
allegory, a morality story embedded within the tale of the Mariner’s
fate after killing a divine bird. However, the circumstances behind
the creation of this fantastic tale were actually quite mundane; one
of Coleridge’s primary motivations for writing the poem was to raise
money for a walking tour that had already begun.
On November 13, 1797, Coleridge and Wordsworth (and
Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy) had set out from Alfoxden, headed
toward Watchet, a quaint old port not far from Bristol. As the
evening drew on, Coleridge and Wordsworth began to plan a way to
defer the costs of the tour they had already embarked upon; they
decided to write a Gothic ballad, a type of poetry Coleridge
remembered from his childhood. Gothic ballads were short yet
highly dramatic poems that originated in the oral folk tradition, and
they were much in vogue during the 1790s. Coleridge and
Wordsworth planned to publish their creation in the Monthly
Magazine. As a result, Coleridge created “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.” When finished, it proved to be far more complex than the
Gothic tradition which so heavily influenced it; what’s more, it was
also a “modern” revision of the medieval allegory to which it bears
striking resemblance.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is Coleridge’s retelling of a
strange dream of John Cruikshank, one of his neighbors in Nether
Stowey. Cruikshank dreamed of a skeleton ship, and Coleridge
embellished the dream to include the mortal sin of an old
navigator, the punishment that ensued, and the navigator’s
eventual atonement for his sinful act. Although the poem was
originally planned as a joint literary effort by Wordsworth and
Coleridge (and it was eventually included in their collaborative
work, the Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798), the poem is
essentially Coleridge’s. A few details, however, are attributed to
William Wordsworth, such as the ship navigated by the dead
sailors who surround the Mariner. Wordsworth also contributed

15
one of the poem’s central events, the haunting of a ship’s officer
who had shot an albatross. (Wordsworth had happened across this
detail in Captain George Shelvocke’s Voyage Round the World by the
Way of the Great South Sea [1726].)
Part 1 of “The Ancient Mariner” introduces many of the themes
that are explored throughout the poem. In the first stanza an ancient
Mariner with “a long gray beard and glittering eye” intrudes upon a
wedding guest and prevents him from joining the marriage
celebration. In his detention of the guest, the old Mariner is
interfering with one of the sacraments, a formal religious act
attesting to one’s faith and adherence to the teachings of the
Catholic Church. Furthermore, there are three wedding guests, but
only one is stopped, and though he asks, “Now wherefore stopp’st
thou me?” neither he nor the reader is ever told why. We can only
surmise that this frail old sailor with his “skinny hand” and
“glittering eye” has either some supernatural, hypnotic effect
(known as mesmerism in Coleridge’s time) or that he functions as a
spiritual messenger whose powers are beyond mortal explanation.
“He holds him with his glittering eye— / The Wedding-Guest stood
still, / And listens like a three years’ child: / The Mariner hath his
will.” And though we are told that “the ship was cheered” and that
the bride is “[r]ed as a rose,” the atmosphere on deck becomes
increasingly sinister. The Mariner is absolutely intent on describing
the dire events that lead to his terrible punishment, and the
Wedding-Guest “cannot choose but hear.”
By the end of Part 1 the sacred nature of the albatross is
established, “[a]s if it had been a Christian soul.” The bird also
participates in religious devotions; for instance it observes the
canonical hours, as “it perched for vespers nine.” But the Mariner’s
profane impulses kill this sacred messenger, and by giving in to those
impulses, the Mariner violates a social code (prevalent in medieval
literature) that required a benign stranger be offered hospitality and
warm welcome. (The albatross, though unfamiliar with the customs
of the ship, “ate the food it ne’er had eat,” dutifully returned every
day, despite “mist or cloud, on mast or shroud.”)
In Part 2, we get a detailed description of the landscape and the
climate of the Mariner’s imagination after he killed the sacred bird.
The sea is gloomy and difficult to navigate, “[s]till hid in mist,” and

16
though “the good south wind still blew behind,” moving the ship to
an undisclosed destination, our sense of foreboding grows as we
read “no sweet bird did follow.” The other sailors become like the
chorus in a Greek tragedy, commenting on the Mariner’s guilty
conscience. “For all averred, I had killed the bird / That made the
breeze to blow.”
In the absence of the sacred bird, the environment, as described by
the Mariner, becomes a vision of hell, with the inversion of the
natural phenomena, “[t]he bloody Sun, at noon,” and a retrogression
to a prehistoric time where “slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon
the slimy sea.” The ship is left with only the tormenting memory of
the sustenance the sea had once provided; while still alive, the
Mariner experiences the state of death, where everything is devoid of
motion and vitality. One of the most memorable images of this life-
in-death is the often quoted description of a paralyzed ocean: “Day
after day, day after day, / We stick, nor breath nor motion; / As idle as
a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” The oppressive background
gives way to superstition, including a reference to St. Elmo’s fire, an
atmospheric electricity seen on a ship’s mast and believed by some
to predict disaster. “About, about, in reel and rout / the death-fires
danced at night.”

In Part 3, the sense of deprivation intensifies as the senses are

assaulted and basic human needs are denied. Time itself seems
merciless and tyrannical, offering neither hope nor end to the
suffering. “There passed a weary time. Each throat / Was parched,
and glazed each eye. / A weary time! A weary time!” The images of
hell accelerate and increase as do the nightmarish visions of
preternatural spirits that cannot be seen but nevertheless wreak
untold violence for the killing of the sacred albatross. Coleridge
builds a “poetic” collaboration between a distorted natural world
and a vengeance-seeking spiritual world. “With throats unslaked,
with black lips baked, / We could nor laugh nor wail; / Through utter
drought all dumb we stood.” Further on, the avenging spirits assume
a frightening materiality as Death makes herself known: “Are those
her ribs through which the Sun / Did peer, as through a grate? / and
is that Woman all her crew? . . . Is DEATH that woman’s mate? . . . The
Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she.” Death has won the game with
the mariners and her fearful price is that all the sailors must die,

17
“[f]our times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) . . .
They dropped down one by one,” leaving the Mariner completely
alone and isolated.
Part 4 brings us back to the detained Wedding-Guest who has
been paralyzed by the frail but powerful old sailor. The Mariner
exercises absolute emotional and physical control over the unwilling
guest, who says, “‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner! / I fear thy skinny
hand!’” The Mariner addresses the Wedding-Guest’s terrible anxiety
with a subtle, yet-unexplained response: all will somehow turn out
well in the end because he, the Mariner, is still alive. “Fear not, fear
not, thou Wedding-Guest! / This body dropped not down.” The
Mariner continues with his tale of how he, the sole survivor of a
mortal sin brought on by his own hand, lived through his hell on
earth while surrounded by death and destruction. “The many men,
so beautiful! / And they all dead did lie: / And a thousand thousand
slimy things / Lived on; and so did I.”
Something crucial happens at the end of this section; the Mariner
begins to undergo a spiritual rebirth, signaled by a transformation in
his understanding of the terrors he has been forced to endure. While
watching the snakes and other creatures beyond the shadow of the
ship, where light and vision are possible, the Mariner reflects how
joyful these creatures seem in their celebration of life. “O happy
living things! no tongue / Their beauty might declare / A spring of
love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware.” Though
he is not yet conscious of his own spiritual awakening, his
expression of love begins his journey toward the expiation of sin and
eventual salvation. (This same spiritual awakening, as we will see, is
completely absent in “Christabel.”)
Part 5 continues the process of spiritual renewal. The Mariner
becomes less conscious of his own physical, material being as he
begins to see his own soul. At one point, he says he has lost all
sensation; he moves without feeling, another life-in-death
experience: “I moved, and could not feel my limbs: / I was so light.”
The experience intensifies as Nature participates by demonstrating a
frenetic energy: “The upper air burst into life! . . . And to and fro,
and in and out, / The wan stars danced between.” This motion
inexplicably does not move the ship, and yet it propels it
nevertheless. In a similar fashion, the dead sailors on deck begin to
groan without speaking as they move their lifeless limbs, becoming

18
animated corpses. “They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose; / Nor
spake, nor moved their eyes; / It had been strange, even in a dream, /
To have seen those dead men rise.” The dead sailors assume their
former functions on board the ship, “a ghastly crew.”
This weird description makes the Wedding Guest anxious, and he
interrupts the Mariner. The Mariner assures him that the quasi-
resurrected crew do not return in pain and anguish—only their souls
have returned and they are “[b]ut a troop of spirits blest,” now able
to sing heavenly songs rather than the common language of mortal
man. “And now ’twas like all instruments, / Now like a lonely flute; /
And now it is an angel’s song, / That makes the heavens be mute.”
Coleridge’s imagery of the animated corpse is not simply a
supernatural element but, rather, reflects the poet’s interest in the
scientific and pseudo-scientific issues of the late 18th century. He
was influenced by the work on electricity and magnetism of Joseph
Priestley, a scientist and radical reformer who shared many of the
same political beliefs with the young poet.
A little further on, when the Mariner falls into a swoon, yet
another version of a life-in-death experience, he hears two voices in
the air speaking to one another, wondering if he is the one who “laid
full low / The harmless Albatross.” Once the voices have correctly
identified the Mariner, they agree that though he has already paid
for his terrible crime, he needs to expiate his sin more fully. “The
man hath penance done, / And penance more will do.”
Part 6 continues with the Mariner still under a spell, having
fallen down by some invisible power that causes him to jerk back
and forth. His condition resembles a religious trance, a state where
one forgets the body and is instead transported into a spiritual
realm. Meanwhile, the dialogue between the two voices continues.
The first voice inquires about the strange force that mysteriously
moves the ship, to which the second voice responds that it is
propelled from beneath, then quickly advises the first spirit to
move quickly before the Mariner awakens. “Fly, brother, fly! more
high, more high! . . . For slow and slow that ship will go, / When
the Mariner’s trance is abated.”
When the Mariner awakens, he is confronted with the sight of the
dead men, gathered together in a collective stare from which he
cannot turn away. The sight is but a spell and quickly vanishes,

19
leaving the Mariner fearful of the next vision he may be compelled
to witness. “Like one, that on a lonesome road / Doth in fear and
dread . . . Because he knows, a frightful fiend / Doth close behind
him tread.”
However, his fear is soon transformed into joy; that change is
signaled by the wind, which for the romantic poets always meant
spirit. The wind is a benign and healing presence: “It raised my hair,
it fanned my cheek / Like a meadow-gale of spring.” That healing
presence continues to manifest itself as the Mariner becomes aware
of celestial beings, the highest ranking angels in heaven, on board
the ship. “The seraph band, each waved his hand: / It was a heavenly
sight.” This is a holy presence, the vision of which no mortal being
has the power to remove. “Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy / The
dead men could not blast.” The Mariner, having confessed his sin
and endured his penance, has finally been granted absolution by a
third presence, a good Hermit. “He’ll shrieve my soul, he’ll wash
away / The Albatross’s blood.”
In the concluding section, Part 7, the Mariner, accompanied by
the Hermit, is miraculously saved from drowning as the ship
suddenly sinks. “Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound, / . . . Like
one that hath been seven days drowned / My body lay afloat.”
Shortly thereafter, the Mariner “stood on the firm land,” and he
immediately asks the Hermit to hear his confession. “O shrieve me,
shrieve me, holy man.” When asked by the Hermit to state what type
of man he really is, his body is subjected to a violent twisting by an
invisible force; this overwhelming physical gesture causes him to
speak up. As a result, the Mariner is at last set free. “Forthwith this
frame of mine was wrenched / With a woeful agony, / And then it
left me free.”
An evil spirit leaves his body. This last “trial” in the Mariner’s
imaginative journey signals his final step toward spiritual
redemption. The completion of the redemptive process has a strange
effect on the Mariner, who is now compelled to tell his tale to a
stranger whenever the right one appears. “I have strange power of
speech; / That moment that his face I see, / I know the man that
must hear me.”
And so the poem of the ancient Mariner ends with the Wedding-
Guest unable to attend the marriage because he is “stunned, /And is

20
of sense forlorn.” Though the tale is over, and the Mariner has
learned the lesson that man must love “all things both great and
small,” the end of the narrative is ambiguous. The Wedding-Guest
remains captive, still within the grasp of the old man’s overwhelming
rhetorical powers. That captivity prevents the Wedding-Guest from
participating in the marriage sacrament, compelling him instead to
participate in the Mariner’s imaginative journey. “A sadder and a
wise man, / He rose the morrow morn.” 

21
 Critical Views on
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
MAUD BODKIN ON THE EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF
THE POEM

[Maud Bodkin is the author of The Quest for Salvation in an

Ancient and Modern Play (1941). In the excerpt below from
her chapter entitled “A Study of ‘the Ancient Mariner’ and
of the Rebirth of Archetype,” Bodkin discusses the
emotional effects this poem produces in the reader.]
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem that, within its lifetime of
a century and odd years, has proved its power to awaken a deep
response in many individuals. Also it is a romantic poem in the full
sense of that term, as expounded, for example, by Professor
Abercrombie—a poem whose reality depends upon the inner
experience projected into its fantastic adventures, or, in the words of
Coleridge himself, a poem in which the shadows of imagination
become momentarily credible through ‘the semblance of truth’
which we transfer to them ‘from our inward nature’. Such a poem
seems specially likely to reward the kind of examination proposed in
these essays. To inquire concerning the emotional patterns activated
in response to the poem is to inquire into the poem’s meaning—in
the sense of that emotional meaning which gives it reality and
importance to the reader, as distinct from any truth it might convey
concerning happenings in the outer world. To communicate
emotional rather than intellectual meaning is characteristic of all
poetry, but we may well select, at the outset of our study, poems the
ground of whose appeal is most evidently the expression of the
inner life. . . .
I would propose first the question: What is the significance, within
the experience communicated by The Ancient Mariner, of the
becalming and the renewed motion of the ship, or of the falling and
rising of the wind? I would ask the reader who is familiar with the
whole poem to take opportunity to feel the effect, in relation to the
whole, of the group of verses, from Part the Second:
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
’Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break

22
 The silence of the sea!
. . . . . . . . .
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion:
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
and from Part the Sixth:
But soon there breathed a wind on me,
Nor sound nor motion made:
Its path was not upon the sea,
In ripple or in shade.
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow-gale of spring—
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming. . . .
Mr. Hugh I’Anson Fausset in his study of Coleridge has
pronounced the poem of The Ancient Mariner ‘an involuntary but
inevitable projection into imagery of his own inner discord’. Of the
images of the stagnant calm and of the subsequent effortless
movement of the ship, Fausset says they were ‘symbols of his own
spiritual experience, of his sense of the lethargy that smothered his
creative powers and his belief that only by some miracle of ecstasy
which transcended all personal volition, he could elude a
temperamental impotence’. If we pass from considering our own
response to the poem to consider with Fausset the more speculative
question, what were the emotional associations in the mind of
Coleridge with the imagery he used, there seems to be a good deal
that confirms Fausset’s interpretation.
Coleridge has told us how poignantly he felt an obscure symbolism
in natural objects. ‘In looking at objects of Nature,’ he writes, ‘I seem
rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for
something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing
anything new.’ This is a typical expression of that attitude which
Abercrombie describes as characteristic of the romantic poet—the
projection of the inner experience outward upon actuality. There
seems little doubt that, possessing this tendency to find in natural
objects an expression of the inner life, Coleridge felt in wind and in
stagnant calm symbols of the contrasted states he knew so
poignantly, of ecstasy and of dull inertia.

23
 He has told us of the times when he felt ‘forsaken by all the forms
and colourings of existence, as if the organs of life had been dried up;
as if only simple Being remained, blind and stagnant’; and again, of
his longing for the swelling gust, and ‘slant night-shower driving
loud and fast’ which, ‘whilst they awed’—
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!
So, also, the image of a ship driving before the wind is used by him
as a conscious metaphor to express happy surrender to the creative
impulse. ‘Now he sails right onward’ he says of Wordsworth engaged
upon The Prelude, ‘it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he
drives before it’. In The Ancient Mariner the magic breeze, and the
miraculous motion of the ship, or its becalming, are not, of course,
like the metaphor, symbolic in conscious intention. They are
symbolic only in the sense that, by the poet as by some at least of his
readers, the images are valued because they give—even though this
function remain unrecognized—expression to feelings that were
seeking a language to relieve their inner urgency.
In the case of this symbolism of wind and calm we have a basis of
evidence so wide that we hardly need go for proof to introspective
reports of reader or poet—interesting as it is to see the confirmatory
relation between evidence from the different sources. We find graven
in the substance of language testimony to the kinship, or even
identity, of the felt experience of the rising of the wind and the
quickening of the human spirit.
—Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of
Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1934): pp. 26–27,
34–35.

PETER KITSON ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE

FRENCH REVOLUTION
[Peter Kitson is a well-known scholar and the author of
numerous books and articles on the Romantics. He is a
contributing editor of such titles as Coleridge and the

24
 Armoury of the Human Mind: Essays on His Prose Writings
and Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire:
1780–1830. In the excerpt below from his article,
“Coleridge, the French Revolution, and ‘The Ancient
Mariner’: Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation,” Kitson
discusses the relevance of the French Revolution and the
origins of Coleridge’s ideas on guilt and restoration.]
S. T. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was written
against the background of the collapse of the poet’s hopes for the
improvement of mankind by political action, the ultimate failure of
the French Revolution to distinguish itself from its oppressive
Bourbon predecessors. The contribution of Coleridge’s political
beliefs to this poem has never been fully appreciated. Certainly ‘The
Ancient Mariner’ has none of the political allusions which stud the
contemporaneous ‘France: an Ode’ or ‘Fears in Solitude’ and this has
led most critics to concur with E. M. W. Tillyard that the poem
exhibits ‘a total lack of politics’. Yet given the circumstances which
gave rise to ‘The Ancient Mariner’, this very absence of political
content is itself political. As Carl Woodring puts it, if Coleridge’s
supernatural poems are poems of escape, ‘politics form a large part
of what they escaped from’.
The importance of the French Revolution to ‘The Ancient
Mariner’ can be seen in Coleridge’s obsession with that other poet
and disillusioned supporter of revolution, John Milton. During
1795–96 he fills the Gutch memorandum notebook with allusions
and references to Toland’s edition of Milton’s prose works of 1698.
Coleridge had Milton’s career very much in mind when writing ‘The
Ancient Mariner’. Like himself, the poet of Paradise Lost had
witnessed the complete wreck of his own hopes for a regenerated
nation. In March 1819 Coleridge delivered a lecture on Milton and
Paradise Lost which tells us a great deal about his own state of mind.
Milton was: ‘. . . as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man;
but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in
religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit
and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by
enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal’. . . .
The ideas of guilt and restoration which are implicit in ‘The
Ancient Mariner’ were developed by Coleridge over several years and
grew out of his observation of the career of the French Revolution.

25
Coleridge appears to have become a supporter of the Revolution and
an upholder of dissenting views of society and religion through his
contact with William Frend during his time at Jesus College,
Cambridge. Whatever the source of his opinions, it is clear that
Coleridge became a keen supporter of the Revolution who remained
loyal even during the difficult years of Robespierre’s Terror. Like
other British radicals Coleridge ascribed the excesses of the
Revolution to the intervention of the counter-revolutionary forces
who combined to destroy it in 1792. . . .
There have been almost as many readings of ‘The Ancient
Mariner’ as there are critics. Few, however, have made any real
attempt to place the poem within the context of Coleridge’s loss of
faith in political action, a context which is demanded by Coleridge’s
other writings. Most critics have taken as a starting point Coleridge’s
contemporaneous candidature for the Unitarian ministry at
Shrewsbury and have located the poem in a Christian environment.
As Robert Penn Warren puts it, the shooting of the albatross
‘symbolises the Fall, and the Fall has qualities important here: it is a
condition of will, as Coleridge says “out of time”, it is the result of no
single motive’. Non-Christian evaluations of the poem have tended
to follow J. L. Lowes’s dictum that ‘The punishment, measured by
the standards of a world of balanced penalties, palpably does not fit
the crime’. The moral of the poem, outside the poem, is meaningless.
Such critics as E. E. Bostetter have denied that the poem contains
any balanced theology; instead it shows that ‘the universe is the
projection not of reasoned beliefs but of irrational fears and guilt
feelings’. These critics ignore the religious elements of the poem,
concentrating instead on its psychological aspects. At least two
critics, however, have made an attempt to locate the poem in
Coleridge’s political development. William Empson argues that it
was the maritime expansion of colonial powers and their subsequent
guilt at their treatment of other civilizations which is the poem’s
main theme, and J. R. Ebbatson believes that the punishment meted
out to the mariner and his shipmates represents ‘European racial
guilt, and the need to make restitution’.
Christian readings tend to stress the redemptive aspects of the
poem whereas non-Christian evaluations concentrate on the strong
sense of guilt it communicates. It is not within the scope of this
discussion to adjudicate between the two positions. Instead I should

26
like to place the poem in the context of Coleridge’s retreat from
politics and his new-found sense of inward and individual
restoration. Within this framework the elements of redemption and
guilt are of paramount importance.
Coleridge was disillusioned with the French Revolution but also
convinced of the depth of his own country’s guilt. He had come to
believe that this national and collective guilt was only a reflection of
man’s original sin. During the composition of ‘The Ancient Mariner’
Coleridge was brooding upon his own sense of personal guilt. In this
sense D. W. Harding is right; Coleridge knew very well the mental
depression and sense of worthlessness with which he invests his
mariner in Part IV of the poem:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The Mariner becomes aware of his own inner depravity and
isolation: ‘A wicked whisper came, and made | My heart as dry as
dust.’ It was a crime for the mariner to shoot the albatross just as it
was a crime for Eve to eat the apple. It was also a crime for Coleridge
to believe and encourage people to expect that mankind could
improve itself by its own action unaided by grace. As R. L. Brett puts
it, ‘the killing of the albatross is representative of a class of which it is
itself typical. It is symbolical . . . of all sin’.
—Peter Kitson, “Coleridge, the French Revolution, and ‘The Ancient
Mariner’: Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation,” Yearbook of
English Studies 19 (1989): pp. 197, 198, 204–05.

JOHN T. NETLAND ON THE ROLES OF THE WEDDING-

GUEST AND THE EDITOR
[In the excerpt below from his article “Reading and
Resistance: The Hermeneutic Subtext of The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” John T. Netland argues that within the

27
 poem are two respondents to the mariner’s strange tale, the
Wedding-Guest and the gloss-writing editor, each of whom
serves a particular interpretive function.]
In our attention to the Mariner’s gripping narrative, we often forget
that the poem is, at least on one level, about understanding—and
responding to—an extraordinary tale. The poem contains a record
of two such respondents: the Wedding-Guest who is compelled to
listen to the Mariner, who overcomes his early resistance to the
“grey-beard loon,” and who emerges from the encounter deeply
moved; and the gloss-writing editor who, in the written record of
his reading, demonstrates a sympathetic, scholarly interest as he
seeks to explain and interpret the tale, but who never shares the
Wedding-Guest’s affective response. This hermeneutic subtext is
also apparent in the cryptic nature of the narrative itself. The tale
unfolds as a mythological narrative about the supernatural,
revealing a primal pattern of fall, confession, and restoration. The
Mariner commits a grievous offense which, however cryptic it
remains, consists of something more heinous than killing the bird:
he has transgressed a moral order, the nature of which he is at first
unaware and of which he remains only dimly cognizant at the end
of the tale. The narrative remains a story with an elusive meaning,
and translating story into ideational coherence becomes the
necessary hermeneutic task, a task undertaken by the historically
belated writer of the marginal glosses. Although we might expect
this reader, with his apparent sympathy and scholarly acumen, to
represent the ideal Coleridgean reader, we discover on the contrary
that his notes do precious little to help us understand the Mariner’s
experience. Rather, it is the Wedding-Guest who emerges from this
encounter “sadder and wiser,” who, by being initiated into a
profoundly meaningful (if mysterious and disturbing) human
experience, demonstrates a much clearer understanding of the
Mariner’s experience than does the gloss-writer.
What accounts for the difference between these two respondents?
Certainly one possibility, now a staple of criticism, is the distinction
between knowing and experiencing: the gloss-writer is so intent
upon knowing what transpired that he fails to experience the pathos
of the tale in the way that the Wedding-Guest does. Yet beyond such
privileging of emotional experience over cognition, the gloss-writer’s
failure is also an imaginative failure. There are no relevant categories

28
in the gloss-writer’s rationalistic, enlightened mind in which to place
the Mariner’s distinctly non-rational experience. This textual
encounter between the editor and the Mariner thus problematizes
the hermeneutic encounter of a modern, rationalistic reader with a
distinctly premodern, myth-like text, and the hermeneutical impasse
in the marginalia stems from the failure of this reader to negotiate
his own ideological commitments and boundaries with those quite
different values of the Mariner. In contrast to Suleiman’s dissenting
reader, who stops disbelieving the narrative conventions after having
suspended disbelief, and to McGann, who consciously resists what
he believes to be an act of ideological coercion, this gloss-writing
reader simply ignores that which lies beyond his imagination.
Though virtually ignored for nearly a century after publication,
the marginal glosses have generated no little interest in the twentieth
century. . . . Though the voices of the Mariner and this editor were
recognized as distinct, most early analyses managed to harmonize
the differences. More recently, critics have seen these differences as
irreconcilable and competitive. Not surprisingly, as Max Schulz
notes, “deconstructionists, phenomenologists, and critical skeptics of
varying hues [have seized] on the interplay between poetic narrator
and prose glossist as an ironic model of the rhetorical experience
that is the reader’s.” Yet one need not rely solely on contemporary
theory to insist that the gloss notes represent an ironic point of view,
for Coleridge’s practice of and reflections on reading during the
years in which he revised the marginalia suggest that the gloss notes
can hardly be taken at face value. . . .
It is not simply a tension between competing moral visions that
these voices reveal. Sarah Dyck, Frances Ferguson, and K. M.
Wheeler have all pointed out differences between the gloss-writer’s
and Mariner’s moral visions: the gloss-writer’s systematic attempts
to attribute causality and to impose moral closure on the narrative
by insisting on the primacy of the Mariner’s lesson in universal
benevolence; the Mariner’s unsystematic, inarticulate, and likely
uncomprehended experience in a world whose morality—though
real—resists easy classification. Such readings properly increase our
distrust of the facile ease with which the gloss notes reduce the
Mariner’s experience to a simple ethical lesson. Yet there is a deeper
tension in this poem, a tension which becomes clearer when this
dialogic relationship of text and commentary is situated in the

29
hermeneutical and doctrinal polemics of the emerging discipline of
biblical scholarship, with which Coleridge was both familiar and
actively engaged. By situating the poem in the Higher Critical
hermeneutical tradition, McGann alerts us to the ideological
tensions between reader and text. What his analysis does not
acknowledge, however, is that the poem is less syncretistic and
harmonious than he suggests; rather, it contains a tension between
contrasting religious imaginations—between the mystical, symbolic,
irrational power of the religious sublime on the one hand and a
categorical, enlightened, and rational systemization of religious
experience on the other. And this narrative tension works precisely
to undermine the type of modernist presumption with which
McGann calls for a resistance to Coleridge’s presumably outdated
Christian ideology.
—John T. Netland, “Reading and Resistance: The Hermeneutic
Subtext of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Christianity and
Literature 43, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): pp. 39–40, 41.

SARAH WEBSTER GOODWIN ON THE WEDDING

CEREMONY
[Sarah Webster Goodwin has written many articles on the
Romantic period. She is also a contributing editor of such
titles as Death and Representation and The Scope of Words: In
Honor of Albert S. Cook. In the excerpt below from her
article on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Goodwin
focuses on the often marginalized wedding ceremony as the
true center of the mariner’s story.]
Domesticity is not exactly what comes to mind when you read either
Frankenstein or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” These are not
works about Gemütlichkeit, plenitude, the pleasures of the hearth. If
we are to look for domesticity in them, we have to turn to the
margins. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” literally marginalizes
the home, embodied in the wedding that frames the poem and
whose domesticized bowers and maidens are apparently antithetical
to everything in the mariner’s tale. Frankenstein might be said to

30
invert that structure since it opens and closes on an ocean voyage
with a narrator who explicitly refers to Coleridge’s poem as a
guiding influence; and all three of the novel’s most climactic
moments occur when the monster enters a home and destroys it—
one of them on Frankenstein’s wedding night. Thus the structural
inversion is really a mirror image: in both works domesticity is
marginal, threatened, seemingly inadequate to the powers informing
the central acts and mysteries that are narrated. . . .
These works repress domesticity, and the monstrous arises from
that repression. Departing from Freud’s theory of the uncanny, das
Unheimliche, in which Freud shows that the uncanny embraces both
meaning of heimlich—the secret and the familiar—I want to
reconsider the secret affinity between the domestic and the
monstrous. In these works, feminine domesticity is closely aligned
with kitsch, that uncanny monster that is both marginal to art and
its mirror image.
Kitsch eludes easy definition; it is a term that not only censures a
would-be art object, but also locates the work within a certain kind
of relation to art. That relation has several dimensions in the
evolution of kitsch as a critical category. First, the work of art is
construed as authentic, in contrast to the inauthenticity of kitsch.
Second, the inauthenticity of kitsch derives directly from its place in
a postindustrial economy; this economy represents art as
commodity. Thus its development in history directly parallels that of
middle-class consumerism—and, not coincidentally, of
Romanticism as cultural phenomenon: kitsch and Romanticism
emerged at the same historical moment. . . . I am arguing here that
kitsch is also related to gender differences, that certain kinds of
kitsch are marginalized because of their links with feminine
domesticity. To put it most bluntly, “high” art historically needs to
leave home. As art’s uncanny double, kitsch must be repressed,
silenced, kept out of sight in the work that aspires to seriousness. But
the very process of repression can leave its uncanny traces in the
text. Frankenstein and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are works
haunted by a repressed feminine domesticity whose identity is
closely related to “inauthentic” art—to kitsch. . . .
Looked at through this lens, it would seem that the wedding at the
margin of the ancient mariner’s story is in fact its center—its secret
care, even its obsession. That suspicion is confirmed by the

31
grotesque female form that appears at one of the poem’s turning
points, the figure that approaches on the spectre ship and casts dice
for the mariner’s soul:
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
This is the harlot who inverts, and subverts, the wedding—who
blights with plagues the marriage hearse. She has been read as the
deformed mother, the object of desire distorted by the poet’s guilt
and rage. Any biblical or apocalyptic reading of the poem must take
her into account as the Whore of Babylon, seductive but fatal, the
dark counterpart to a vision of the New Jerusalem. Her complement
is not only the bride, but the good mother, Mary, whose protective
powers the mariner repeatedly invokes. Multiply demonic, LIFE-IN-
DEATH has the bad taste to win the dice game against her
presumably male opponent—and to cry out in triumph. There seems
little question that hers is the triumph of the castrating female, that
secret, fearful presence at the heart of the home. The mariner must
encounter that presence even in the exclusively, oppressively male
domain of the ship at sea. Although critics have consistently located
the poem’s climax in Part VII, the moment when the mariner blesses
the (phallic, possibly narcissistic) water snakes, surely the encounter
with LIFE-IN-DEATH is at least as central. Her dice game marks a
turning point in his existence from which there is clearly no return;
and, as Edward Bostetter has pointed out, the fact that it is a game of
chance she wins is crucial to any reading of the poem’s larger
meaning. Perhaps because critical debate about the poem has been
much exercised to define the nature and consequences of the
mariner’s blessing, it has paid relatively little attention to what we
might call the poem’s other center, its feminine one.
—Sarah Webster Goodwin, “Domesticity and Uncanny Kitsch in ‘The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Frankenstein,” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991): pp. 93–95.

32
MORSE PECKHAM ON THE POEM AS A VOYAGE OF
DISCOVERY
[Morse Peckham has written extensively on the Romantic
period and is the author of numerous books, including
Romanticism and Ideology and The Romantic Virtuoso. In
the excerpt below, Peckham traces the predominant trope of
a voyage of discovery to the travel literature of the 16th and
17th centuries. He argues that “The Rime of the Ancyent
Marinere” is really a new type of poem exploring the
relationship of the individual to his culture.]
Coleridge’s claim in “France: An Ode,” his response to the aggression
of France towards Switzerland, that liberty could not be achieved by
social instrumentalities meant that like Wordsworth he was engaged
in rejecting his cultural tradition and in becoming increasingly
alienated from the dominating traditions of European culture. And
that is the theme of his greatest achievement, The Rime of the
Ancyent Marinere.
The foundational trope or metaphor of the poem came from the
great sixteenth and seventeenth centur y voyage and travel
compilations of Richard Hakluyt of 1589 (enlarged 1598–1600) and
those of his assistant and successor, Samuel Purchas, in 1625: a
voyage of discovery the culmination of which was the voyage around
the world from England around Cape Horn to the Pacific and thence
back to England. To tell the story of the poem would be otiose, for
everyone educated in England or the United States knows it. But the
poem’s interpretation is another matter. For in fact it was a new kind
of poetry. In an allegorical narrative the most important proper
names, and sometimes all of them, belong to an explanatory system
of which the poem itself is an exemplification. In this poem there is
nothing of the sort, at least in the poem’s original form. Indeed, we
are justified in seeking to explain the poem, to consider it as a kind
of allegory in which the proper names do not belong to any
explanatory system, only because the lines “And she is far liker Death
than he; / Her flesh makes the still air cold” are changed in the final
version (1817) to “The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she / Who
thicks man’s blood with cold.” The clearly allegorical proper names,
capitalized by Coleridge, provides a strong instruction that the
whole poem is properly considered an exemplification of some kind

33
of explanatory system—although at first glance indeterminable—
whether religious, political, metaphysical, or psychological.
With this hint it is possible to discern a pattern to the whole, and
that pattern is best understood as concerned with the relation of the
individual to his culture. The first step is to realize that the Mariner
commits the same kind of action twice—first when he shoots the
albatross which had played with the sailors and shared their food;
and second when he interrupts the wedding and holds the wedding
guest back from a celebration of social solidarity. Both actions are
violations of community and as such are typical Romantic cultural
vandalisms. This redundancy is extended when the priest to whom
the Mariner confesses goes mad. Confession does not, as it should,
restore the Mariner to solidarity with a community. And by a further
extension of this redundancy the Mariner is condemned to eternal
wandering and telling his story without receiving absolution or
membership in any community.
Coleridge does not provide explanations for any of these actions
and events. He is interested only in the nature of the act and its
consequences. This is why the ship set out from England with no
stated purpose either of exploration or of economic enterprise.
Coleridge thus abstracts society, or community, from the matrix of
interactions, without considering the possible purpose or goal of
social relationships and patterns of interaction. So the Mariner’s act
is incomprehensible; Coleridge appears to be looking at
Wordsworth’s incomprehensible abandonments from the point of
view of the abandoner, the violator. And it might even be said that
the Mariner’s crime (as Coleridge calls it in his 1817 gloss) is a
manifestation of an alienation symbolized most traditionally by the
antarctic cold, which is subsequently identified with Life-in-Death.
But this cold is followed by the entrance into a new world, one into
which no human had ever penetrated. The Mariner finds himself in
an absolutely novel cultural condition, one in which his primary
feeling is guilt as indicated by the heat, by the albatross hung around
his neck instead of the cross, the emblem of Christian community,
and by the death of his shipmates. He is now completely alone
in a terrifyingly hideous and repulsive world. But again
incomprehensibly he blesses the horrifying monsters of the world,
and blesses them unconsciously. “Unaware” is Coleridge’s word.
Here is a parallel to the subsequent creation of Liberty by the
culturally unaided individual in “France: An Ode.” The albatross

34
drops into the sea; the Mariner is freed from a culturally assigned
and determined guilt. Beneath the notion of liberty in “France” lies
the profound notion of the ascription of value; the Mariner’s
hideous world suddenly changes into a world of great beauty.
Moreover it is done unconsciously. Coleridge’s way of indicating
with the utmost commitment that the creation of value is not a
social act but one which arises from an individual’s resources—
resources which he does not know he has and which he cannot
consciously control.
—Morse Peckham, The Birth of Romanticism: Cultural Crisis
1790–1815, Greenwood, Fla.: The Penkevill Publishing Company,
1986): pp. 126–28.

H. R. ROOKMAAKER JR. ON HUMANITY’S RELATIONSHIP

WITH NATURE

[H. R. Rookmaaker Jr. is a well-known scholar and the

author of several books, including Synthetist Art Theories:
Genesis and Nature of the Ideas on the Art of Gauguin and
His Circle (1959). In the excerpt below from the chapter
entitled “Alienation Reconsidered: ‘The Ancient Mariner,’”
Rookmaaker argues against a moral interpretation of the
poem and instead focuses on the difficulties inherent in
humanity’s relationship with nature.]
Many critics have tended to interpret the poem in moral terms along
lines broadly indicated by Adair’s statement that ‘The Ancient
Mariner is concerned with the existence of evil, the spiritual aridity
which follows it, and the eternal wandering of the soul which is only
partially redeemed’. In contrast, I will argue that the primary
significance of the poem is not of a moral character, but
epistemological in that it deals with an exploration of the
implications of Coleridge’s attitude to the relation between man and
nature, as it has been outlined in the previous chapters of this study.
Before presenting my own case, I will indicate briefly some of the
more influential approaches to the poem. R. P. Warren’s famous
essay, ‘A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading’ may

35
serve as an example of the more optimistic moral interpretations of
the poem. He argues that the poem essentially tells ‘a story of crime
and punishment and repentance and reconciliation’ and he
characterizes its primary theme as ‘the theme of sacramental vision,
or the theme of the “One Life”’. In his conception the shooting of the
albatross ‘re-enacts the Fall’ in that it is ‘symbolically, a murder, and
a particularly heinous murder, for it involves the violation of
hospitality and of gratitude . . . and of sanctity’. For this murder the
mariner is subsequently punished, after which a process of
reconciliation is set in motion culminating in the mariner’s
recognition of the ‘one Life’. . . .
If one believes with Warren that the poem describes an ordered,
just, and ultimately benevolent universe, one can hardly avoid the
vexing problem of the significance of its natural and supernatural
imagery. Warren tries to impose a consistent pattern of symbolism
on the imagery, but, as has been shown repeatedly by others, his
attempt does not really succeed. Warren’s excellent failure in this
respect has made other critics wary of proposing a comprehensive
interpretation of the poem’s imagery. But the stakes are high: if the
imagery is inconsistent or arbitrary, it must be concluded that the
mariner’s universe, described in terms of this imagery, is to some
extent arbitrary and without order. No wonder that critics have
continued the attempt to find a satisfactory symbolic pattern in the
imagery. . . .
It will be argued that Coleridge’s preoccupation with man’s
relation to nature, with the difficulties inherent in his notion of
nature’s life-giving activity and man’s passive receptivity, is also the
poet’s main concern in ‘The Ancient Mariner’.
It may be best to recall briefly the stage of development
Coleridge’s thought had reached when he wrote ‘The Ancient
Mariner’. At this time he did not question the benevolent, divine
character of the external world. He believed that if man is open to
nature’s influence, he will come to recognize God in nature resulting
in virtue, happiness, and a true understanding of the world and its
beauty. Of decisive importance is the conditional clause, ‘if man is
open to nature’s influence’: nature is the language God speaks to
man, but it is up to man whether he is willing to listen to it or not.

36
 Man can also shut himself off from nature’s influence, consciously
like the protagonist of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Left Upon a Seat in a
Yew-Tree’, or unconsciously, through grief or guilt, like Margaret in
‘The Ruined Cottage’, or Osorio. As Coleridge had already affirmed
in 1796, man is capable of ‘Untenanting creation of its God’, so that
instead of ‘a vision shadowy of Truth’, he sees ‘vice, and anguish, and
the wormy grave, / Shapes of a dream’. If man is blind to the
presence of divine light in nature, he is left with his own self-
imposed darkness which he in turn projects on nature so that he
becomes ‘A sordid solitary thing . . . / Feeling himself, his own low
self the whole’, surrounded by a nature that is no more than an
extension of his own mind, his own dejection or fear.
In ‘The Ancient Mariner’ Coleridge tried to face the implications
of this reverse side of his faith in nature, tried to describe the causes
and consequences of man’s alienation from nature and God. If this is
accepted, it will appear that the poem has its proper place in the
development of Coleridge’s thought and does not contradict his
statements in the apparently more optimistic poems he wrote at the
same time.
—H. R. Rookmaaker Jr., Towards a Romantic Conception of Nature:
Coleridge’s Poetry Up to 1803: A Study in the History of Ideas
(Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984): pp. 65,
66–67, 68–69.

37
 Thematic Analysis of
“Frost at Midnight”
Written and published in 1798, “Frost at Midnight” has traditionally
been categorized as part of a group referred to as Coleridge’s
“conversation” poems. The basic features of these poems are a
seemingly serene setting, a muted atmosphere, a distinct narrative
voice that maintains a conversational manner with at least one
interlocutor, and a confidential and intimate tone, as if the narrator
is speaking with a close friend. Critics have often viewed these
poems as requiring a knowledge of certain biographical facts about
Coleridge. In his essay on the conversations poems, G. M. Harper
has described the poems as “Poems of Friendship,” stating that
“[t]hey cannot be even vaguely understood unless the reader knows
what persons Coleridge has in mind” (The English Romantic Poets).
Although the predominant voice in the conversation poems is the
speaker’s, the speaker is not self-centered. Instead, he conveys his
inner thoughts and feelings, and this introspection in turn provides
a point of departure for understanding the world outside the self. In
a word, the speaker is meditating and, at the same time, addressing
another listener. In these poems the listener is always mute for one
reason or another and therefore cannot respond, as in “Frost at
Midnight,” where Coleridge is speaking to his infant child, Hartley.
Despite the intimacy and familiarity of the poems, they also
possess an element of mystery, as will be seen in “Frost at Midnight.”
The speaker’s communion with a mute, inanimate, or at times
absent interlocutor produces this subtle supernatural dimension.
Although these poems are in the guise of a conversation, they are in
fact a product of a poetic imagination that sought to eliminate the
barriers between the individual mind and its experience of the
phenomenal world.
The source of these poems’ strangeness, therefore, may spring in
part from the fact that the poet combines the realistic description of
a particular location with the artistic language of his innermost
thoughts and feelings. This fusion of inner being with exterior
world, this blending of thoughts and feelings with objects and
natural phenomena, would later become Coleridge’s theory of the
symbol.

38
 The structure of the conversation poems follows a basic time
pattern of present-past-future, with a concluding return to the
present. They begin with an initial crisis in which the poet
experiences alienation from a particular, familiar location, even
while he continues to exist within it.
The first stanza begins with a description of the speaker sitting
alone at night with his sleeping baby and the quiet coziness of their
interior space. “My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. / ’Tis calm
indeed! So calm, that it disturbs.” The natural world depicted in
stanza one does not participate in the sweet repose of the child.
Outside, “The owlet’s cry / Came loud” and the silence of the
village distresses the speaker’s mind, for it is a silence that “vexes
meditation with its strange / and extreme silentness.” The speaker
experiences a profound loneliness and separation, despite the
familial surroundings in which all others sleep undisturbed. His
feelings of isolation are so extreme he is unable to sustain the
emotional balance necessary to enter a meditative state; instead, he
is deeply distracted.
Despite these feelings, the speaker attempts to reestablish his
equilibrium by focusing on the “the low-burnt fire” that “quivers
not.” In its all but extinguished state, the fire appears to be in
sympathy with the speaker’s feelings of isolation. The fire has not
fully died, however, and neither has the speaker lost all hope of
communication with his surroundings.
He establishes an imaginative relationship with the dying embers,
sensing that they somehow share his uneasiness with the disquieting
silence. “Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, / Still flutters
there, the sole unquiet thing. / Methinks, its motion in this hush of
nature / Gives it dim sympathies with me who live.” This dwindling
vestige of life, “whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit / By its
own moods interprets,” becomes the source of possible regeneration
for the speaker’s dying spirits. Therefore, the poet keeps it alive in his
mind as another being seeking to find itself.
Amid the dying embers of spiritual well-being and the poetic
struggle to reestablish those feelings, the most important and
mysterious element is Nature itself. Nature performs a religious
function from the very outset of stanza one: “The Frost performs its
secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind,” but we cannot see what

39
inspires and animates the Frost to perform this office. Thus, the poet
identifies the frost with his imagination, which supplies its own
hope and consolation for him.
In the second stanza, the poet reflects on his childhood and the
way in which he experienced the fluttering embers. “How, oft, at
school, with most believing mind, / Presageful, have I gazed upon
the bars to watch that fluttering stranger!” This stanza, where he
describes the burning embers as a “stranger,” something from which
he remembers feeling alienated, contrasts sharply with his
description of the very same phenomenon in the first stanza, where
he is able to feel a kinship with a fire that has “dim sympathies with
me who live.” In the present, the fire is a friend, though symbolically
it was a stranger in his childhood. However, despite the various
references to childhood memories of the “stern preceptor,” referring
specifically to the Rev. James Boyer at Christ’s College, the
predominant and implicit theme of this stanza is the expectation
that a close companion will soon arrive: “For still I hoped to see the
stranger’s face, / Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved.”
In the next few lines the poet establishes another opposition. In
contrast to the silence of the first stanza, the young boy recollected
by the poet is one who was “stirred and haunted” by the ringing of
the church bells, “falling on mine ear / Most like articulate sounds of
things to come!” The present is silent, but the past is full of sound.
In the third stanza, the silence returns—“the gentle breathings,
heard in this deep calm”—with the father rejoicing in the beauty of
his child. “My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart.” Having achieved
a communion with Nature, delighting in the stillness of the cottage,
the adult poet now turns his thoughts to the infant son. He projects
his imagination into a blissful future where the sweet child will live
in harmonious relationship to Nature, “wander[ing] like a breeze /
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain.”
However, this wish for his child is in sharp contrast to his own
remembrance of the feelings he experienced while growing up in the
city. The imagery of that experience is expressed in terms of
imprisonment. “For I was reared / In the great city, pent ’mid
cloisters dim, / And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.” He
wishes that his son would be fully alive to all the sensual pleasures
and freedom to be found in Nature: “So shalt thou see and hear /

40
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that external language
which thy God / utters.” In a word, Nature will respond to his son as
a dear companion, delivering a message from God.
Having gone from past to future, in the last stanza of the poem
the adult poet returns from his imaginative journey to the present
time with a renewed sense of joy and rejuvenated spirits, vowing that
he will never again feel alienated from Nature. “Therefore all seasons
shall be sweet to thee, / Whether the summer clothe the general
earth / . . . or the redbreast sit and sing / Betwixt the tufts of snow.”
The poem ends with the “secret ministry of frost” having performed
its spiritual mission. 

41
 Critical Views on
“Frost at Midnight”
JAMES K. CHANDLER ON WORDSWORTH’S
UNDERSTANDING OF COLERIDGE
[James K. Chandler is the author of Questions of Evidence:
Proof, Practice and Persuasion Across the Disciplines (1994).
In the excerpt below, Chandler cites “Frost at Midnight” to
explain Wordsworth’s construction of Coleridge in The
Prelude as a man traumatized by the big metropolis and the
failure of the French Revolution.]
Though Wordsworth has tactfully emphasized that he and
Coleridge “by different roads, at length have gained / The self-same
bourne,” and though he insists that he writes to Coleridge in order
to have a sympathetic ear for his own self-exploration, it is
nonetheless true that Coleridge is addressed here as a man in
trouble by a poet who thinks he can help. The “Coleridge” of The
Prelude turns out to be one of those many Englishmen who have
been traumatized by the “vast city” and by the failure of those
revolutionary expectations which the “encreasing accumulation of
men in cities” helped to create.
That this intention governs the poem from the start is suggested
by Wordsworth’s bracketing of the entire 1799 manuscript of The
Prelude within allusions to “Frost at Midnight.” The first allusion
occurs in the original poem’s second sentence:
For this didst thou,
O Derwent, travelling over the green plains
Near my “sweet birth-place” didst thou beauteous Stream
Make ceaseless music through the night and day . . . ?
The second allusion introduces the concluding address to Coleridge
from which I have just quoted:
Thou, my Friend, wast reared
In the great city ’mid far other scenes. . . .
To understand how these allusions function in The Prelude, we must
recall their original context. “Frost at Midnight,” the prototype for
“Tintern Abbey,” is a dramatization of the poet’s reverie as he sits

42
before his cottage fire, his babe in his arms, on a February night. The
reverie is controlled by the lore which Coleridge knows about the
“film” or “stranger” fluttering on the grate: it is supposed, as his note
informs us, “to portend the arrival of some absent friend.” Because
the film is “unquiet” on the grate, the speaker sees it as an image of
himself,
a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

To the complex spatial mirroring of this situation is then added a

kind of temporal mirroring, as the speaker, still under the spell of
the superstition of the “stranger,” now calls to mind moments from
his days at school in London when, “with most believing mind,” he
would similarly gaze “upon the bars / To watch the fluttering
stranger.” In such moments, moreover he would be carried back to
still earlier times:
. . . and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

The reason why Wordsworth’s allusion to this passage cannot be

taken innocently is that Coleridge does not represent this reverie-
within-a-reverie as a pleasant experience. It is rather an exercise in
frustration, a case of unrelieved anxiety:
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

43
The movement of Coleridge’s mind in this poem is meant to betray
the profound self-insufficiency that is acknowledged in the closing
address to the infant Hartley, i.e., in the passage to which
Wordsworth alludes at the conclusion of the 1799 MS of The Prelude
(book 2 of the 1805 and 1850 versions):
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Wordsworth alludes to Coleridge’s poignant confession of city-
caused anxiety and emotional instability in order to offer himself to
Coleridge as a man who already has wandered like a breeze by lakes
and sandy shores, beneath mountains and clouds. He also offers
himself as a poet who has learned “far other lore” than that which
informs the mind of Coleridge, and he will go on in The Prelude to
show how the power of this natural lore saved him from psychic
harm in a time of trouble. If The Prelude can become “A power like
one of Nature’s,” as Wordsworth hoped, it could then be a source of
natural lore for debilitated urbanites who suffer what Coleridge
suffers.
“Frost at Midnight” was written in February 1798, in the midst of
the two-month period during which Wordsworth conceived his
great program for poetry. The Prelude was begun later in that year.
During the latter part of the winter of 1803–4, when Coleridge’s
health suffered its sharpest decline, Wordsworth worked hard on the
poem to expand it to its planned five-book form. During his stay
with the Wordsworths in December and January, Coleridge was, in
W. J. Bate’s words, “very ill, probably from an overdose of narcotics”
and “suffering with repressed guilt” over his decision to leave the
country. At some point between 6 March and 29 March, just before

44
Coleridge did leave the country, Wordsworth decided to expand the
poem to include his own debilitating experiences in London and in
France. Not long after this decision was taken, probably in late
March, Wordsworth composed for The Prelude a second farewell to
his friend and auditor, the longest address of its kind in the entire
poem. The opening blessing recalls the conclusion of book 2:
Speed thee well! divide
Thy pleasure with us; thy returning strength
Receive it daily as a joy of ours;
Share with us thy fresh spirits, whether gift
Of gales Etesian, or of loving thoughts.
—James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the
Poetry and Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984):
pp. 240–43.

MARY JACOBUS ON THE CONTINUITY OF THE

IMAGINATION
[Mary Jacobus is a well-known scholar and the author of
numerous books and articles on the Romantics. Her books
include Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays
on the Prelude and First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in
Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis. In the excerpt below from
the chapter “‘Tintern Abbey’ and the Renewal of Tradition,”
Jacobus discusses “Frost at Midnight” as a poem about the
interior life of the imagination, analogous to Wordsworth’s
“spot of time” or remembrance of childhood, which records
the continuity of the imagination despite the changes
brought about by growth and time.]
For all that ‘Tintern Abbey’ owes to the past, its most important debt
is to the poetry written by Wordsworth and Coleridge themselves
during the first half of 1798. ‘The Pedlar’ provided the impulse
towards a statement of belief, ‘Frost at Midnight’ provided an
impressive model for the kind of poetry which Bowles had failed to
write, and which Wordsworth himself had never previously
attempted—the poetry of inner life. In ‘Frost at Midnight’ the

45
familiar themes of loss and renewal are subsumed into a new
concern with the power of the mind to link past, present, and
future in organic relationship. Like Bowles’s Monody, Coleridge’s
poem is an eleg y for a past self; but another principle of
organization is now at work—not the meditative-descriptive
parallel, but imagination. Where earlier Conversation Poems had
centred on moments of transcendental experience or insight, ‘Frost
at Midnight’ centres on a Wordsworthian ‘spot of time’, a vivid
recollection of childhood experience which looks forward to Part I
of the 1799 Prelude. Both poems invite entry into the poet’s
consciousness, and both use the processes of self-realization—their
recognition of becoming as well as of changing—to demonstrate
the essential continuity of inner life. . . .
In Coleridge’s poem, the ‘secret ministry of frost’ becomes an
analogue both for the silent, inner workings of thought, and for the
transforming power of the imagination. As the natural world is
transfigured, the world of the individual changes its face from one of
solitude and self-imprisonment to one of relationship and freedom.
Coleridge’s opening, like the start of ‘Tintern Abbey’, suggests a
mind turned inward; the external world is merged into the calm of
thought:
THE Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelp’d by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings on of life
Inaudible as dreams!

‘Sea, hill and wood . . . Sea, and hill, and wood’—the repetition is
lulling, but not sleepy. Coleridge’s surroundings are ‘Inaudible as
dreams’, but his younger self achieves the vividness of a present
reality; ‘the numberless goings on of life’ have been displaced by
memory. . . . The silence that ‘disturbs / And vexes meditation’ in
‘Frost at Midnight’ suggests both the heightened awareness of

46
midnight solitude, and the way in which silence has itself become
the most important sign of mental life. In Hazlitt’s phrase, it is a
‘busy solitude’. In ‘Frost at Midnight’, the suppressed paradox—a
disquieting quiet—signals the suspension of ordinary sense-
perception. . . .
The major achievement of the Conversation Poem is its fusion of
subjective experience and philosophic statement. Feeling and
meaning interpenetrate, and the discursiveness of The Task gives way
to a kind of poetry that is both more economical and more
profound. In ‘Frost at Midnight’, the random reflections of Cowper’s
fire-gazing become the basis for a poem about the power of the
imagination to bring mind and nature into creative relationship. The
point of reference for its movement to and fro in time is the
‘stranger’, the sooty film on the grate—described by Cowper with the
mock-seriousness which allows him to comprehend the ordinary
within his Miltonic idiom:
Nor less amused have I quiescent watch’d
The sooty films that play upon the bars
Pendulous, and foreboding in the view
Of superstition prophesying still
Though still deceived, some strangers near approach.
To Coleridge, the restless play of the film becomes a metaphor for
the mind’s unceasing activity. But the projection of his own life onto
other things has troubling implications. Is adult consciousness self-
reflecting, self-imprisoned, no longer a means of effecting entry into
either the world of the imagination or the world beyond the self?
Only that film, which flutter’d on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing,
Methinks, it’s motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live,
Making it a companionable form,
With which I can hold commune. Idle thought!
But still the living spirit in our frame,
That loves not to behold a lifeless thing,
Transfuses into all it’s own delights,
It’s own volition, sometimes with deep faith,
And sometimes with fantastic playfulness.
Ah me! amus’d by no such curious toys
Of the self-watching subtilizing mind,
How often in my early school-boy days,
With most believing superstitious wish

47
 Presageful have I gaz’d upon the bars,
To watch the stranger there! and oft belike,
With unclos’d lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birthplace, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot fair-day,
So sweetly . . .
The recollection of ‘the hot fair-day’ releases Coleridge’s imagination
into the free flow of memory. The vivid ‘spot of time’ experienced by
the child is in contrast to the adult’s mental processes (‘the self-
watching subtilizing mind’), and his daydream paradoxically brings
a fuller encounter with reality. The adult’s mind experiences itself:
the child’s imagination relives the whole stretch of the fair-day
(‘From morn to evening . . .’).
—Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical
Ballads (1798) (London: Clarendon Press, 1976): pp. 118–20, 121–22.

PAUL MAGNUSON ON THE POEM’S POLITICAL CONTEXT

[Paul Magnuson is a well-known scholar and has written
extensively on the Romantic period. His works include
Wordsworth and Coleridge: A Lyrical Dialogue (1988) and
Reading Public Romanticism (1998). In the excerpt below
from his article, “The Politics of ‘Frost at Midnight,’”
Magnuson discusses the poem within a political context, a
reading which depends on its location within the same
volume as the other conversation poems and on the public
debate in which it participates.]
I will elaborate an argument that “Frost at Midnight” is a political
poem if it is read in the dialogic and public context of Coleridge’s
other poems and the political debates of the 1790’s. A comparison of
“Frost at Midnight” with other Coleridge poems yields a conclusion
contrary to House’s. But before I ask about the significance of a
Romantic lyric, I want to ask about its location: Where is it? and
Who conspired to put it there? The method that I will follow argues
that a lyric’s location determines its significance, and to change a

48
poem’s location is to change its dialogic significance, sometimes
radically. “Frost at Midnight” was written in late February 1798. It is
commonly read as an intensely subjective, meditative lyric written in
isolated retirement and reflecting the isolated consciousness of its
author; or it is read in the context of Coleridge’s other Conversation
Poems such as “The Eolian Harp” and “This Lime-Tree Bower,” and
it echoes the themes of those poems with which it was grouped as
“Meditative Poems in Blank Verse” in Sibylline Leaves (1817); or it is
read in the context of Wordsworth’s lyrics, particularly “Tintern
Abbey.” But it was first published in the fall of 1798 as the final poem
in a quarto volume that began with two explicitly political poems:
“Fears in Solitude” and “France: An Ode.” These two poems were
also written early in 1798, and “France: An Ode” was published in
the Morning Post, April 16. The quarto was published by Joseph
Johnson, the radical bookseller, in the early fall after Coleridge met
him in late August or early September while he was on his way to
Germany with Wordsworth.
I propose to locate “Frost at Midnight” in the context of the
other poems in the volume and to locate the volume in the context
of the political debates conducted in the popular press. . . . I will
be comparing Coleridge’s poems with other written material that
is not often considered in a traditional explication; I draw upon
the political pamphlets and political journalism, which implies
that a Romantic lyric participates in the ordinary language of the
day. For this contexual reading there is no distinction between an
aesthetic language that is unique and separate from ordinary
language. . . .
To put all this in a simpler way: I will be looking at the public
Coleridge and the public location of the poem. Our reconstructions
of Coleridge in this century are based upon the publication of his
notebooks and letters, by our knowledge of the scholarship that has
traced his reading, and by our knowledge of his later career. None of
these were available to his contemporaries, whose comments make
the history of the reception of the poem and whose debates
constitute the context of its publication. . . .
For a reading of “Frost at Midnight” in the public dialogue, the
crucial dates are those of the composition of the volume in late
August or early September 1798, when Coleridge first met Joseph
Johnson. The dates of the writing of the poem are relatively

49
insignificant, because the purposes of publication are more
important than Coleridge’s original intentions in drafting the
individual poems. To publish, in the 1790’s, was inevitably to enter a
public debate. In August, when the volume was composed, both
author and publisher were under attack from the press and the
government. Joseph Johnson, whose name appeared boldly on the
title page, had been placed on trial in the Court of the King’s Bench
and convicted on July 17 for selling Gilbert Wakefield’s A Reply to
Some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff ’s Address to the People of Great
Britain. His indictment reads in part: “Joseph Johnson late of
London bookseller being a malicious seditious and ill-disposed
person and being greatly disaffected to our said Lord the King . . .
wickedly and seditiously did publish and cause to be published a
certain scandalous malicious and seditious libel. . . .” Although he
had been found guilty, sentencing was postponed for many months
for obvious reasons. At the hearing on his sentence, he would have to
produce evidence of his good behavior in any plea for leniency. His
sworn statement at the hearing claimed “that where he could take
the liberty of doing it, he has uniformly recommended the
Circulation of such publications as had a tendency to promote good
morals instead of such as were calculated to mislead and inflame the
Common people.” . . .
The public debate that the volume entered was composed of a
rhetoric of purposeful duplicity, distortion, and personal attack, and
Coleridge was constantly in the sights of the Anti-Jacobin, which
contains many attacks on him although often Coleridge is not
mentioned by name. One of its major aims was to expose the errors
in the liberal press, which it ranged under three categories: lies,
misrepresentations and mistakes. Its Prospectus promised to present
“Lies of the Week: the downright, direct, unblushing falsehoods,
which have no colour or foundation whatever, and which at the very
moment of their being written, have been known to the writer to be
wholly destitute of truth.” Yet its own rhetoric was that of parody
and distortion. The early numbers contained essays on Jacobin
poetry, whose major targets were Southey and Coleridge. . . .
“Fears in Solitude” calls upon his countrymen to rise and defeat
the impious French. “France: An Ode” deplores French aggression
while retaining admiration for the Revolution. And “Frost at

50
Midnight” concludes with six lines that were later deleted. The
“silent icicles” will shine to the moon
Like those, my babe! which, ere to-morrow’s warmth
Have capp’d their sharp keen points with pendulous drops,
Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty
Suspend thy little soul: then make thee shout,
And stretch and flutter from thy mother’s arms
As thou would’st fly for very eagerness.
The public and dialogic significance of “Frost at Midnight” in the fall
of 1798 was that it presented a patriotic poet, whose patriotism
rested on the love of his country and his domestic affections.
Coleridge specifically instructed Johnson to send a copy of the
volume to his brother, the Reverend George Coleridge. As the
reviewer in the Monthly Review (May 1799) put it, “Frost at
Midnight” displays “a pleasing picture of virtue and content in a
cottage,” hardly a penetrating critical comment of interest to us in
these days of deconstruction and hermeneutics, until one recognizes
that the word “content” implies the negation of its opposite.
Coleridge is not discontent, not ill-disposed to the existing state of
society; he is not, therefore, seditious.
—Paul Magnuson, “The Politics of ‘Frost at Midnight,’”
The Wordsworth Circle 22, no. 1 (Winter 1991): pp. 3–4, 6.

JERROLD E. HOGLE ON THE POEM’S GOTHIC ELEMENTS

[Jerrold E. Hogle is the author of Evaluating Shelley (1996)
and Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the
Development of His Major Works (1988). In the excerpt
below from his article “The Gothic Ghost as Counterfeit
and Its Haunting of Romanticism: The Case of ‘Frost at
Midnight,’” Hogle discusses the way in which a “high
romanticist” such as Coleridge actually depends in “Frost at
Midnight” on the “low” elements of Gothic writing, such as
spectral figures and fantastic trappings.]

51
Thanks especially to Anne Williams, we are no longer in any doubt
that the Gothic and what we call the “Romantic” in poetry are
symbiotically interrelated, especially in some of the best-known
English poems of the 1780’s through the 1820’s. Many features of
verses by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Keats, and Percy
Bysshe Shelley, as well as aspects of works by Anna Letitia
Barbauld, Mary Robinson, and Joanna Baillie, turn out (we now
see) to be Gothic quite frequently and hauntingly, even in the sense
that they replay quasi-archaic images and spectres used, not just in
older “graveyard poetry,” but throughout the short tradition of
neo-Gothic fiction and drama that was nominally launched in
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which was given the
pointed and quite marketable subtitle A Gothic Story (making it
the first book to use the label) in 1765. At the same time, though,
thanks equally to the work of Michael Gamer, we are also aware
that so-called “High Romantic” w riting, par ticularly by
Wordsworth and Coleridge, ironically situates itself as relatively
“high cultural” poetry by distinguishing itself explicitly from the
“lowness” and threatening excess of Gothic novels and plays (even
as Coleridge in particular wrote quasi-Gothic drama in Remorse).
The Gothic, particularly the horror Gothic in its pre-“shilling
shocker” mode in the 1790’s, is clearly one target—called “frantic
novels”—among “the gross and violent stimulants” against which
Wordsworth sets off his and Coleridge’s non-incendiary and
“natural” poems suited in their contemplative moderation to “the
discriminating powers of the mind,” according to the Preface to the
Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads. . . .

I want to suggest here why it was that both of these inclinations

arose at the same time and what it means that at least some
“Romantic” writing was extensively based on the very Gothic
spectres whose “manufacture” and “cheap” mobility some of the
“high Romantics” strove forcefully to condemn. After all, there is a
reason why Gothic images and ghosts would seem “manufactured”
to such writers beyond the fact that Gothic fictions were being
widely printed and sold in the “lower culture” marketplace. From the
very start of the “Gothic” mode as soon as it began reusing that
much older label as a marketing device, there has been a very fake
and mechanically reproduced quality to much of what the Gothic
offers, whether it be in novels, plays, paintings, or Gothic-revival
architecture. . . .

52
 A vivid case in point, since I can focus on only one example in this
short space, is Coleridge’s much-discussed “Frost at Midnight,”
particularly in its initial 1798 printing, though much of what I find
there also applies to the better-known final version of this poem.
The key image through which Coleridge’s autobiographical speaker
connects his current awareness to his memories is, of course, “that
film, which flutter’d on the grate” and “Still flutters there” as an
“unquiet thing” in the fireplace of a “cottage” surrounded by “Sea,
hill, and wood.” Coleridge provides a footnote to this image, even in
1798, intimating that “in all parts of the kingdom these films are
called strangers, and supposed to portend the arrival of some absent
friend,” and this allusion to circulating folklore soon justifies the
poem’s recollection of “school-boy days” when the speaker “watched
the stranger there” by gazing on the film in a different fireplace of
another time. As Humphry House noted decades ago, to be sure, all
these moments recall Book IV (“The Winter Evening”) in William
Cowper’s The Task (1785), where “have I quiescent watched / The
sooty films that play upon the bars . . . in the view / Of superstition
prophesying still . . . some stranger’s near approach.” But Coleridge
gothicizes the image far more than Cowper did, partly by turning
the film into the ghostly “stranger,” partly by making it hauntingly
“companionable” as an “unquiet thing” vaguely echoing the past,
and partly by allowing that fluttering shade, on the basis of its use in
folklore and poetry already circulating for many years, to float from
being a film on a cottage grate in 1798 to seeming a “stranger” in an
earlier schoolroom fireplace, to taking the form of a “stranger’s face”
appearing to enter the schoolroom from his distant “birthplace” at a
moment when the “school-boy” speaker may have been halfway
between dreaming and waking. This figure partakes of virtually all
the qualities we have noted in a Gothic ghost of the counterfeit. It
harkens back into the past towards a seemingly natural reference-
point with a definite social status, yet it circulates far beyond that old
foundation as a floating signifier able to attach itself to different
beings and objects again and again, all with the aid of texts that have
recontextualized the figure more than once (paralleling the history
of the word “Gothic,” as we have seen). At every point, the “stranger”
refers to what is already a mere signifier at the earlier stage, even
when the term seems attached to a face from the speaker’s earliest
youth and thus not really a stranger. The face the poem finally
arrives at is a sequence of shifts under the overall label of “stranger,”
a movement across a “Townsman, or aunt, or sister” from his

53
“birthplace” that does not decide among them, even as the word
“stranger” becomes a spectre of a counterfeit (as well as “uncanny”)
by being the sign of someone who has come to seem unfamiliar (or
re-coined) but is not ultimately strange to the speaker in the oldest
location he remembers.
Hence Jan Plug can write of “the rhetoric” in “Frost at Midnight”
that, even as “it attempts to literalize itself ” (in a face, for example),
“the literal figure . . . never arrives,” just as it never truly does in the
Walpolean Gothic. The poem’s later hope that the “Dear babe” in the
present cottage may have a less displaced life than the speaker has
had—a hope given some encouragement by the poem’s seeming
capacity to trace the “stranger” back to a primordial person and
“birthplace”—all of this is already and continually haunted by how
the mechanically reproduced “stranger” remains other than itself and
always a ghost of what is spectral to begin with, already textualized,
and at least partly unauthentic at every turn. The rising terror hinted
early in the poem when the “unquiet” film reminds the speaker of
just how “dim” the original foundations of memory have become
may indeed be turned into a sense of continuity bridging the
separate stages of the growing self.
—Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Gothic Ghost as Counterfeit and Its
Haunting of Romanticism: The Case of ‘Frost at Midnight,’”
European Romantic Review 9, no. 2 (Spring 1998): pp. 283, 284,
287–88.

JONATHAN BATE ON POLITICAL THEMES WITHIN THE

POEM
[Jonathan Bate is a well-known scholar who has written
extensively on the Romantic period. His books include
Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental
Tradition (1991) and The Romantics on Shakespeare
(1992). In the excerpt below from his article, “Living with
the Weather,” Bate focuses on the way in which the
“political” themes of domestic virtue and the need to
defend Britain from the anticipated invasion of 1798 are

54
 interwoven within “Frost at Midnight,” elucidating the
differences between being and dwelling.]
With its thatch-eves, mossed cottage-trees and morning mistiness,
Keats’s imaginary dwelling-place is built upon the Nether Stowey
cottage-home described by Coleridge in “Frost at Midnight.” The
verbal echoes sound from the closing section of “Frost”:
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Or mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

At the micro-political level of ideology, “Frost at Midnight”’s

celebration of snug (though surely not smug) domestic virtue may
be related to a Burkean defense of “home” against French
revolutionary innovation during the invasion-fear of 1798; at the
macro-political level of ecosophy it is a meditation on the
relationship between being and dwelling, achieved through a subtle
interplay of what Serres calls les deux temps.
The secret ministry of the frost (weather) is the exterior analogue
for the equally secret interior ministry of the memory (time). As the
frost writes upon the window-pane, so memory writes the poet’s
identity. By the end of the night both the environment of the cottage
and the ecology of the poet’s mind will have subtly evolved. The poet
has learnt to dwell more securely with himself, his home and his
environment. But the structure of the evolution is that of a
topological network, not a Newtonian sequence of action and
reaction. The distinction I have in mind here is one made by Serres
in his Éclaircissements. If you take a handkerchief and lay it flat to
iron it, you can define fixed distances between points on it: this is the
geometry of the classical age. But if you crumple up the same
handkerchief to put it in your pocket, two points that were far apart
can be near together or even superimposed on one another: this is
the topology of networks. For Serres, both time and the weather are
structured according to this kind of topology.

55
 Chaos theory has a name for these relationships: they are fractal. I
believe that as Keats had an intuitive knowledge of the importance
of illusory excess as a principle of community ecology, so Coleridge
had an intuitive knowledge of the fractal structure of time and
weather. How may we measure the motions of “Frost at Midnight”?
The pattern of the frost; the flickering of the flame and the flapping
of the film on the grate; the flowings of breeze, wave, cloud, thaw-
steam, eve-drop and icicle? They are fractal. The poet’s abstruser
musings have dim sympathy with these motions because they have a
similar structure, in that the poem’s temporal structure is not
classically sequential, but crumpled like Serres’ handkerchief in such
a way that it makes manifest neighborings (“voisinages”
[Éclaircissements]) which are invisible to the modern Constitution.
The temporal structure may be simplified as present-past-future-
present. In its imagining of the baby Hartley’s future, the poem
proposes an ideal mode of dwelling in which the human subject is
set into a new relationship with the objects of nature:
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags.
The child is imagined as becoming like the weather, the breeze which
plays across both land and water. But, more than this, the
Enlightenment form of spatial perception is shattered: the
parallelism of “beneath the crags” and “beneath the clouds” breaks
down the rigid distinction between solid and vaporous matter, while
the image of the mountains and clouds imaging the lakes reverses
the classical structure of substance and shadow (real mountain
above, illusory image reflected in water below). The dislocation—the
pliage—is such that it no longer seems appropriate to talk about
human subject and natural object. The Cartesian subject/object
distinction is made to vanish.
The imagined relationship between Hartley and nature is like the
articulated relationship between Samuel and Hartley. The italicized
thou strives to replace the dialectic of subject and object with an
intercourse of I and thou. Where the subject/object relationship is
one of power, the I/thou is one of love. Bond and tie replace mastery
and possession. An ecofeminist language of nurture and care, as

56
against male technological exploitation, is again apposite. What is
truly radical about “Frost at Midnight” is Coleridge’s self-
representation as a father in the traditional maternal posture of
watching over a sleeping baby. In ecofeminist terms, this realignment
of gender roles clears the way for a caring as opposed to an
exploitative relationship with the earth.
—Jonathan Bate, “Living with the Weather,” Studies in Romanticism
35, no. 3 (Fall 1996): pp. 445–47.

57
 Thematic Analysis of
“Christabel”
Published in 1816, “Christabel” is a poem written in two parts, Part I
written in 1798 and Part II in 1800. The poem was influenced by
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry, a collection of medieval ballads—
short, highly dramatic poems that originated in the folk tradition.
These ballads were at one time transmitted orally among illiterate
people, and they included pieces of Gothic horror such as
vampirism, violence, eroticism, and strange, gloomy settings. The
Gothic influence is plain in the work of novelist Matthew Lewis,
whose book The Monk Coleridge discussed in an article for The
Critical Review of February 1797. In his introduction to The Monk,
John Berryman states that “this grotesque school helped usher in the
English Romantic Movement and debauched taste without ever
really participating in the glories of the movement unless in the
book before us.”
These tales also contain elements of medieval literature, such as
haunted castles, magic spells, and treacherous journeys.
“Medievalism” was much concerned with stories of unrequited love
as an essential part of the Middle Ages’ courtly love tradition. The
poem’s central character, Christabel, who searches for her long-
absent lover, is very much in the same tradition.
Part I begins with the tale of “the lovely lady” Christabel, the
daughter of the rich but ineffectual Baron, Sir Leoline. (This name
is ironic, for it implies all the attributes that the character lacks,
namely the strength and courage of a lion.) In the poem’s opening
scene, Christabel is in a dark and foreboding forest that is
transformed into a unnatural landscape when the distinction
between night and day is ominously disturbed. Though it is “the
middle of night by the castle clock, . . . the owls have awakened the
crowing cock.” An important part of this brooding setting is Sir
Leoline’s dog, “a toothless mastiff bitch,” who howls at the clock.
Some say the dog is haunted by “my lady’s shroud,” the symbol of
Christabel’s deceased mother.
From the outset of the poem, we encounter a rhetorical device
that is repeated several times. A narrative voice poses a question to
the reader and then responds to its own question. In the first

58
occurrence, the narrator questions the “true” circumstances of the
world of “Christabel”: “Is the night chilly and dark? / The night is
chilly, but not dark.” In so doing, the narrative voice effectively
heightens the suspense and drama about to unfold.
Within the forest is a huge oak covered with “moss and the rarest
mistletoe,” a reference to a pre-medieval, Celtic system of belief that
venerated this parasitic plant when it grew on an oak tree. The
landscape of the poem is definitely feminine in nature, with a “huge,
broad-breasted, old oak tree” and a “mastiff bitch”—and the nature
of that femininity is dangerous and duplicitous, as will soon become
apparent when Christabel encounters Lady Geraldine.
Indeed, the oak tree appears to take on the personality of
Geraldine when it seems to be moaning. However, we soon learn
that Geraldine herself is the one who cries out for help. In an
important inversion of the medieval tradition, a woman is the one
who comes to her rescue, none other than Christabel who is likewise
in great distress. “There she sees a damsel bright / Dressed in a silken
robe of white, / . . . A lady, so rich clad as she— / Beautiful
exceedingly.” Christabel reassures the lady: “Then Christabel
stretched forth her hand, / And comforted fair Geraldine.”
Christabel is the substitution here for such valiant, legendary knights
as Sir Lancelot and Gawain; she demonstrates feminine chivalry and
courteous behavior toward Geraldine. “‘O well, bright dame! May
you command / The service of Sir Leoline; / and gladly our stout
chivalry / Will he send forth and friends withal.” The reference to
“our stout chivalr y,” especially indicates Christabel’s full
participation in the chivalric code of honor.
However, her promise of Leoline’s protection is ironic, since in
fact he is old and frail, in no position to offer anyone protection.
Nor, for that matter, is the castle a place of safe haven. Christabel’s
acknowledges as much when she tells Geraldine what to expect when
they enter the castle: “‘Sir Leoline is weak in health, / And may not
well awakened be, / But we will move as if in stealth, / and I beseech
your courtesy, / This night, to share your couch with me.’”
Our first subtle hint of Geraldine’s treachery is at the very point
of her entrance into the castle. Christable, in an inverted marriage-
rite, lifts Geraldine, “a weary weight, / Over the threshold of the
gate”; a legend is associated with the old marriage custom, namely

59
that a witch cannot cross the threshold on her own because it has
been blessed against evil spirits. Once in the castle, their way to the
bedroom is equally fraught with hints of danger; in “a fit of flame,”
Christabel only sees “the lady’s eye, and nothing else.” The damsel in
distress, Geraldine, has begun a process of transformation into an
evil spirit. When they finally arrive at Christabel’s chamber, “carved
with figures strange and sweet,” Christabel offers Geraldine “a wine
of virtuous powers,” which her deceased mother made from
wildflowers. But Geraldine rejects the offer and instead banishes the
mother’s spirit from the room, presaging her evil intent to take
possession of the innocent and unsuspecting Christabel. “‘Off,
woman off! This hour is mine— / though thou her guardian spirit
be, / . . . ’tis given to me.’”
Geraldine does eventually drink the “virtuous” wine, but she still
intends to take possession of Christabel. That possession, while
primarily of spirit, may possibly be sexual as well, although the poet
only hints at this. Once Christabel has undressed, Geraldine does the
same and reveals her truly hideous nature. “‘In the touch of this
bosom there worketh a spell, / Which is lord of the utterance,
Christabel!’” The hideous aspect of Geraldine’s body is her “mark of
shame,” which, she tells Christabel, will soon be fully disclosed.
Geraldine indicates that she and Christabel are united in a
connection where she exercises the most powerful of all control—a
complete dominion over Christabel’s speech. Thus, her control over
Christabel is not only magical, but rhetorical as well, a terrible and
cruel fate of mythic dimensions such as that suffered by Echo, a
figure from Greek mythology who was metamorphosed into stone
and whose only speech was to echo someone else’s words.
Now under Geraldine’s awful spell, Christabel has become her
captive, “the lovely lady’s prison,” and Part I concludes with
Christabel’s wish for divine intervention against this evil spirit. “But
this she knows, in joys and woes, / That saints will aid if men will
call.” That remains to be seen.
Part 2 begins with a reminder of the spiritually and physically
ineffectual Baron who lives in a world devoid of faith and any hope
of salvation. “‘Each matin bell,’ the Baron saith, / ‘Knells us back to a
world of death.’” True to his fallen nature, the world within the castle
is devoid of hope, filled with religious symbols that are mere

60
trappings, emptied of all spiritual significance. There is “the drowsy
sacristan” who counts slowly, merely to fill up the time, and “[t]hree
sinful sextons’ ghosts which hover about,” “[w]ho all give back, one
after t’other, / The death note to their living brother,” suggesting that
Sir Leoline carries the burden of their transgressions.
Christabel, who has awoken from her sleep at the conclusion of
Part I, now feels refreshed because she “hath drunken deep / Of all
the blessedness of sleep!” She is confused by Geraldine’s presence,
and she erroneously believes herself to have committed a mortal sin.
Christabel proceeds to lead the sorceress to Sir Leoline. True to his
fallen status, he cannot see properly (the eyes traditionally believed
to be the gateway to the soul), and because of this defect, he is blind
to Geraldine’s evilness. “With cheerful wonder in his eyes / The lady,
Geraldine, espies.”
He greats her with great respect and ceremony and, when he soon
discovers that Geraldine is the daughter of his long-lost friend, Sir
Roland, the tyranny of history repeating itself is revealed. We are
told that the rupture in the friendship between Leoline and Roland
was due to a particular form of rhetorical violence—it was the direct
result of lies spread by malingering tongues—although we are not
told the specific content of those lies. “But whispering tongues can
poison truth; / And constancy lives in realms above.”
The “madness in the brain” caused by the loss of friendship
resembles various accounts of King’s Arthur’s madness when the
fellowship and trust of his roundtable was destroyed by deceit. “Each
spake words of high disdain / And insult to his heart’s best brother.”
As Leoline remembers Roland, his inability to truly see Geraldine
causes his specious regeneration at the expense of his daughter. “Sir
Leoline, a moment’s space, / Stood gazing on the damsel’s face: And
the youthful Lord of Tryermaine / Came back upon his heart again.”
However, not all the inhabitants of the castle are so easily deceived.
The Bard Bracy, whom Leoline has commanded to spread the news
of Geraldine’s rescue, has had a nightmare of his own, of “a bright
green snake . . . Close by the dove’s [Christabel’s] head it crouched.”
As a result of his dream, he refuses to embark on his journey.
Meanwhile, the evil Geraldine with “[a] snake’s small eye blinks dull
and shy . . . / And the lady’s eyes they shrunk in her head, / . . .

61
And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread, / At Christabel
she looked askance! —”; Christabel can only passively reflect back
“[t]hat look of dull and treacherous hate.”
But the trance ends abruptly, and Christabel begs that the Baron
banish Geraldine, although Christabel, still under her curse, cannot
speak of what she knows. But, alas, she cannot get Sir Leoline to see
the truth. “And turning from his own sweet maid, / The agèd knight,
Sir Leoline, / Led forth the lady Geraldine.”
The last section of the poem, Coleridge’s ending of Part 2, may
seem wholly unconnected and irrelevant to the narrative that
precedes it, but it makes sense if we understand it as a “companion”
poem offering yet another version of the fundamental problem of
“Christabel.” The poem’s references to a small child, “a limber elf, /
Singing, dancing to itself ” is thought to be Coleridge addressing his
own infant Hartley, the “fairy thing with red round cheeks.” In this
short poem, however, the father’s love is so excessive that it is
transformed into its opposite: “And pleasures flow in so thick and
fast / Upon his heart, that he at last / Must needs express his love’s
excess / With words of unmeant bitterness.”
The lesson here—the same lesson lost on Sir Leoline—is that one
must be vigilant of both words and thoughts, for though they may
seem harmless enough, yet they will return with a deadly power.
“Perhaps ’tis pretty to force together / Thoughts so all unlike each
other . . . To dally with wrong that does no harm . . . Such giddiness
of heart and brain / Comes seldom save from rage and pain, / So
talks as it’s most used to do.” 

62
 Critical Views on
“Christabel”
DENNIS M. WELCH ON THE THEME OF INCEST IN
THE POEM

[Dennis M. Welch is the author of numerous articles on the

Romantic poets. His work includes “Blake’s Songs of
Experience: The World Lost and Found” and “Blake’s Book
of Los and Visionary Economics.” In the excerpt below from
his article “Christabel, King Lear, and the Cinderella
Folktale,” Welch discusses the poem as a ballad, the
narrative elements of which are revisions of the paternal
abuse found in Shakespeare and the fairytale, which identify
the poem’s most terrifying theme of incest.]
Source studies of Coleridge’s mysterious ballad Christabel have been
numerous and yet tentative. In the well-researched and well-known
Road to Tryermaine, Arthur Nethercot admits that he “has not found
any one whole story on which . . . the poem depends.” Similarly,
Kathleen Coburn asserts that “no central fable behind it has ever
been found. . . . the traditional fables on which the narrative parts
are based have been all lost sight of.” In spite of such remarks,
however, several source-hunters and critics have shown that the
ballad includes numerous folktale elements. Indeed, Coleridge
himself, recognizing in the Biographia Literaria the broad and
checkered reception of Christabel “among literary men” even before
its actual publication, acknowledged with some chagrin that the
ballad “pretended to be nothing more than a common Faery Tale.”
Given this acknowledgment and the considerable evidence (explored
in the following pages) that the ballad deals with the paternal abuse
of Christabel (and not merely her repressed sexual fantasies, which
other critics have emphasized), this essay argues that a major source
underlying Coleridge’s poem is the Cinderella folktale. For
variations of this tale have dealt with similar abuse and quite
probably influenced the ballad through his broad reading and
knowledge and especially his interest in Shakespeare’s King Lear,
which itself includes significant aspects of the Cinderella legend.
Although there are many variations of the legend, which have
developed in European and other cultures, several of the variations

63
have elements in common that Coleridge would have recognized.
But, interestingly, he tried to de-emphasize some of these elements
both in his criticism of King Lear and in his ballad. In the following
pages I shall discuss variations of the folktale most akin to the play
and the ballad, indicate relevant parallels between these works and
their common source, and argue that the ballad’s provenance helps
confirm that its true though horrifying subject matter is father-
daughter incest.
According to Marian Cox’s seminal study of the Cinderella story,
the “unlawful marriage” or relationship—a euphemism for incest
between a father and daughter—characterizes one group of the
story’s variants and “has been utilized in the legendary history of
Christian saints, in a number of medieval romances, and in . . .
mysteries based on the same.” For example, in the “Constance Saga,”
from which the medieval romance Emare derives, a young maiden
was rejected by an unnatural father—not unlike Christabel near the
end of her fragmentary tale, where Sir Leoline turned “away from his
own sweet maid.” And just as Leoline had once loved Christabel “so
well,” so in Vita Offae Primi an ancient king of York had loved his
daughter to excess. . . .
A s Alan Dundes observes, “Many [Cinderella] folktales begin
with the queen or original mother already dead” or absent. This
factor was central to one of the most important of all Cinderella
tales, the legend of St. Dipne; and, as I will show, it was important
to King Lear and especially Christabel. According to J. A. S. Collin
de Plancy, Dipne was the lovely daughter of a pagan Irish king.
After her mother died Dipne remained devoted to her memory—
just as Christabel remains devoted to her deceased mother (“O
mother dear! that thou wert here”). But the king—a lustful though
grief-stricken man, whom Sir Leoline closely resembles in his
“wroth” and “madness”—tried to induce Dipne to marry him. As
he became more insistent, she sought solace at her mother’s grave
and counsel from her confessor, who advised her to delay the king
until she could flee. . . .
In a study of King Lear in 1934, James Bransom insinuated that an
“incestuous passion” by the king for one of his daughters may have
influenced his behavior. In a letter to Bransom, Freud agreed,
suggesting that “the secret meaning of the tragedy” involves the
king’s “repressed incestuous claims on a daughter’s love.” But in

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“Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva,’” which was published
(in 1907) long before he wrote to Bransom, Freud has raised
suspicions about Lear although he doubted the king’s culpability,
referring to the love-test at the beginning of the play as “an
improbable premiss.” . . .
Nonetheless, the suggestions of Freud and Bransom concerning
the tragedy have been taken up by more recent scholars—and with
considerable persuasiveness. For example, Arpad Pauncz has argued
that “Lear not only loves his daughters; he is also in love with them,
especially the youngest one.” When Cordelia shrinks from him, his
anger and outrage toward her, which anticipate the reactions of Sir
Leoline toward his daughter in Part II of Christabel, implicate the
king’s real desire. As S. C. V. Statner and O. B. Goodman aver,
“Cordelia’s instinctive withdrawal . . . begets Lear’s guilt-ridden rage,
and he just as instinctively tries to cover the shame of having
touched a forbidden place.” Thus, ironically at the very same time
this father angrily disclaims his “paternal care,” “Propinquity,” and
“property of blood” in Cordelia, he uses words that imply a
“barbarous Scythian” appetite for “his generation.” Regarding the
play’s opening love-test specifically, Mark Taylor says that Lear tries
“to assert his control over the one daughter whom he loves, who has
come of age, [and] who is separating herself from him”—just as
Christabel seeks to do from Sir Leoline despite her lover’s untimely
absence.
—Dennis M. Welch, “Christabel, King Lear, and the Cinderella
Folktale,” Papers on Language and Literature 32, no. 3 (Summer 1996):
pp. 291–92, 293–94, 294–95.

MARGERY DURHAM ON CHRISTABEL’S AMBIGUITY

[Margery Durham is the author of “The Mother Tongue:
Christabel and the Language of Love.” In the excerpt below
from her article, Durham discusses the ambiguity of
Christabel’s character when she vacillates between
innocence and guilt. Durham relates that ambiguity to
recent psychoanalytic theory that indicates the infant’s

65
 relationship to the mother is the source of symbol
formation and language. Thus, this is a way to understand
that ambiguity.]

At the time of its publication a reviewer declared Christabel “the

most obscene Poem in the English language.” Coleridge replied, “I
saw an old book in Coleorton in which the Paradise Lost was
described as an ‘obscene poem,’ so I am in good company.” In its
portrayal of innocence mixed with depravity, Christabel draws
readers into its gothic atmosphere, and there it leaves them,
intrigued and bewildered. Like most readers, I am puzzled by the
way in which Coleridge clouds the innocence of his central female
figure. The ambivalence he suggests can be understood, I think, by
reading the poem in the light of certain passages in the poet’s
notebooks, where his entries around the time he composed
Christabel define topics in which he was deeply, even passionately
interested. Most relevant to the poem are his speculations about
associative thought, as it might function in the origin of both speech
and moral choice. In the notebooks Coleridge speculates that
language may develop from the physical contact between infant and
mother. For Coleridge, culture begins at the breast, and language is
indeed the mother tongue.

A considerable body of psychoanalytic theory recognizes the

infant’s relationship with the mother as the source of symbol
formation and therefore of language and culture, and since
Coleridge himself is credited with coining the word “psycho-
analytical,” it seems all the more reasonable to inquire whether any
of the current theories can yield insights into his poem. Since the
time of Freud and his earliest associates, Melanie Klein and those
who have developed the implications of her work have further
advanced our understanding of the individual’s relationship to
culture, and the tensions they describe in this relationship are, I
believe, analogous to the ambivalence one finds in Christabel. Klein’s
definition of the alternative ways, which she terms “manic” and
“depressive,” by which these tensions are resolved also helps us to
interpret Coleridge’s work. I will therefore compare the poem with
both Coleridge’s notebook speculations and Klein’s more
systematically developed theory. Relevant to this comparison is the
poem’s thematic resemblance, in its consideration of a fall from
innocence, to Paradise Lost, and this parallel provides a mythic

66
resolution of the dilemmas, logical and psychological, which
Coleridge depicts. . . .
Klein began her work with the common psychoanalytic
assumption that all formation of symbols (all fantasy, all
conceptualization, and therefore all mental relationship to the
outside world) is a projection of the infant’s sense of the mother’s
body. Ernest Jones had pointed out that nonmaternal experience can
provide a pleasure similar in quality to that received from the
mother. Then, when access to the original pleasure is blocked, the
infant can redirect its desire to the analogous experience. Cradling
and suckling thus replace the womb. These pleasures can yield to the
enjoyment of solid food, and in time to babbling, to speaking, even
to writing poetry. From this redirection Klein reasoned not only that
the outside world is “the mother’s body in an extended sense,” but
also “that symbolism is the foundation of all sublimation and of
every talent, since it is by way of symbolic equation that things,
activities and interests become the subject of libidinal phantasies.”
From the symbolization of infantile conflict and desire in children’s
play and in art, she developed her theory of reparation, according to
which civilization actively remodels the world into a sublimated
version of the infant’s original pleasure.
Klein also found that the procedure could go wrong, and it is here
that her theory first illuminates Christabel. If the original source of
pleasure fails and no analogous equation has been made, then the
former pleasures become equated with potentially analogous ones
within a category of unfulfillment and therefore of pain. The child
then withdraws from both the painfully tantalizing mother and the
analogous outside world, and the result is paranoid delusion and
inhibition, including as one extreme form the speech-inhibiting
psychosis now termed autism. Putting the matter rather simply:
feeding problems can thus create stuttering and, at last, silence. Most
important for our study of Christabel, Klein maintains that neurosis
and sublimation are inversions of each other and, she adds, “for some
time the two follow the same path” from original pleasure to possible
alternatives and back—for better or worse—to the child. . . .
At best, however, poetry, music, politics—all the civilized arts—
become the means of creating, on the cultural level, a maternal
equivalent. As we reshape the world to our satisfaction, Klein
maintained, we try to recreate the life-giving environment that a

67
mother can no longer provide, and our standard of comparison
(outside the womb) is our recollection of the earliest moments at
the breast. Aesthetic balance may suggest such analogous pleasure,
and I shall argue that Christabel also symbolizes the conflicts within
the reparative struggle.
—Margery Durham, “The Mother Tongue: ‘Christabel’ and the
Language of Love.” In The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist
Psychoanalytic Interpretation, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire
Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1985): pp. 169–70 and 172–73.

AVERY F. GASKINS ON THE POEM AS BOTH A VERSE

DRAMA AND A GOTHIC PARODY
[Avery F. Gaskins has written extensively on the Romantic
period. His articles include “Coleridge: Nature, the
Conversation Poems and the Structure of Meditation” and
“Wordsworth’s Stolen Boat: Some Problems of
Interpretation.” In the excerpt below from his article
“Dramatic Form, ‘Double Voice,’ and ‘Carnivalization’ in
‘Christabel,’” Gaskins discusses the poem as a type of verse
drama containing more than one narrative voice and, at the
same time, a poem that can be read as a parody of the
Gothic novels in which the authority of established customs
and institutions are subverted.]
In the fall of 1797, Coleridge finished a verse drama Osorio as he was
also continuing work on his share of Lyrical Ballads. Among a
number of poems in varying stages of completion upon which
Coleridge worked at this time was “Christabel.” Constructing a
dramatic text for Osorio had left him with the habit of developing
action through dialogue, especially questions and answers, a habit
which he carried over into the writing of Part I of “Christabel.” The
result is a kind of hybrid text which is not drama, but has some of
the feel of drama. For example, after using just thirteen lines setting
the scene, some unidentified narrator begins a series of dialogues

68
with a second unidentified narrator in the form of questions and
answers:
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full;
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is gray:
’Tis a month before the month of May,
And spring comes slowly up this way.
Exchanges such as this dominate Part I up to The Conclusion and
are used by the author in the ways he might have used a single,
omniscient narrator: to add further detail to the setting, to advance
the action, to establish motives for the actions of characters, and to
call special attention to important moments.
It may occur to some persons that these exchanges may not be
dialogues at all and that the questions posed are merely rhetorical
devices utilized by a single narrator. To such a suggestion, I would
have a number of answers. First, the narrator would have to establish
a presence or persona as Byron does for himself in Don Juan before
using rhetorical questions for effect. In the thirteen lines leading up
to the first exchange, no such persona has been established. Second,
since there is already firmly set up in the opening lines a pattern of
narration which is assertive, there was little economy for the
narrator to have broken in with a question to himself or the reader.
Rather than letting line 15 “The night is chilly, but not dark” serve as
an answer, if the narrator had moved to it directly, the story could
have been narrated just as effectively. There must have been another
reason for introducing the question at that point, and I feel it was to
establish a questioner. Third, although a question such as “Is the
night chilly and dark?” may seem rhetorical since the questioner
could have had the answer merely by observing, there are many
others which seem to be genuine requests for information that the
questioner does not have. For example, the questioner has to be told
why Christabel is outside the castle by herself and at night and in the
bedroom scene requests an interpretation of Geraldine’s aside and to
whom it is addressed. . . .
The narrators speak the language of pious gossips. Their role in
the story is to be feckless observers, often horrified or morally

69
outraged at what they are observing, but without the power to
intercede. In a number of places when they sense that Christabel is
being morally or physically threatened, they are reduced to ritualistic
prayer, “Jesu, Maria, shield her well!” In The Conclusion to Part I, as
they reflect on the moral implications of what has transpired in
Christabel’s bedroom, they become indignant and do a great deal of
clucking about. After establishing in the opening that “It was a lovely
sight to see / The lady Christabel, when she / Was praying at the old
oak tree,” they lament the fallen condition of Christabel:
O sorrow and shame! Can this be she,
The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree?
And lo! the worker of these harms,
That holds the maiden in her arms
Seems to slumber still and mild,
As a mother with her child.
A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine! since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady’s prison.
They understand their own lack of power to correct the situation
and must rely on the hope that Christabel herself will turn to prayer
and bring about her own salvation: “And this she knows, in joys and
woes, / The saints will aid if men will call: / For the blue sky bends
over all!” . . .
That “Christabel” may have parodic qualities has not escaped the
notice of critics. Both Edward Duffy and Edward Dramin have
suggested that “Christabel” may be a parody which has as its target
the Gothic Novel. Duffy finds the parody in the characterizations,
and Dramin feels the entire work parodies the major conventions of
the genre.
However, as has already been stated, “carnivalization” uses parody,
but goes beyond it in the sociological and ideological implications it
creates, and in “Christabel,” I can find parodic overtones here and
there that work toward Bakhtinian “carnivalization.” The objects in
these cases are Sir Leoline and the class he represents. Since the
manuscript of “Christabel” is a fragment lacking a conclusion, the
action leading up to where the narrative stops has the potential of
developing into a genuine domestic tragedy concerning an aristocratic
family, or a parodic treatment thereof, and parodic language, where it
is found in the poem, creates the effect of carnivalization.

70
 Without imputing any conscious intent on Coleridge’s part, I
should like to suggest that the carnivalization of the De Vaux
household may be a by-product of Coleridge’s radical political
activities from 1795 to 1798. The Pantisocracy scheme had been an
attempt to escape the class structure of England and set up a more
democratic society in America. Since 1795, he had been making a
number of public and private statements attacking privileged classes
and urging governmental reform. During this period, Coleridge
exchanged letters with the radical, John Thelwell, who had been
tried for treason for supporting the French Revolution and
advocating the overthrow of aristocratic power in government. His
admiration for Thelwell was so great that in July of 1797, just as he
was beginning to write “Christabel,” he invited Thelwell to come
visit him in Nether Stowey with the idea that he might settle there
permanently and the two men might exchange ideas more
frequently and easily.
—Aver y F. Gaskins, “Dramatic Form, ‘Double Voice,’ and
‘Carnivalization’ in ‘Christabel,’” European Romantic Review 4, no. 1
(Summer 1993): pp. 2–3, 4, 7.

ROSEMARY ASHTON ON COLERIDGE’S INDECISIVENESS IN

REGARDS TO GERALDINE
[Rosemary Ashton is the author of George Eliot: A Life and
The Mill on the Floss: A Natural History. In the excerpt
below from her biography of Coleridge, Ashton discusses
some of the reasons for Coleridge’s difficulties in finishing
“Christabel,” difficulties which are in part attributable to
what she sees as his indecisiveness concerning the guilt of
Lady Geraldine. She cites biographical evidence to account
for that indecisiveness.]
Coleridge just could not find, or create, the conditions under which
he could finish ‘Christabel’. ‘I tried & tried, & nothing would come of
it’, he confessed in a moment of plain, unvarnished truth-telling in
an otherwise complicated and contradictory account to Josiah
Wedgwood on 1 November. A notebook entry for 30 October speaks

71
eloquently of his problem: ‘He knew not what to do—something,
he felt, must be done—he rose, drew his writing-desk suddenly
before him—sate down, took the pen—& found that he knew not
what to do.’
Wordsworth, too, saw the problem clearly enough. Surely
Coleridge is the subject of a fragment he wrote at this time:
Deep read in experience perhaps he is nice,
On himself is so fond of bestowing advice
And of puzzling at what may befall,
So intent upon baking his bread without leaven
And of giving to earth the perfection of heaven,
That he thinks and does nothing at all.

It was in Volume II of Lyrical Ballads that Wordsworth included ‘A

Character, in the antithetical Manner’, which Coleridge recognized
as a ‘true sketch’ of himself. In addition to the ‘weight’ and ‘levity’
and the ‘bustle and sluggishness’ Wordsworth discerns in his friend’s
face there is the following telling paradox:
There’s indifference, alike when he fails and succeeds,
And attention full ten times as much as there needs. . . .
The unfinished poem ‘Christabel’ presents the student of Coleridge
with several problems. Questions arise about how it would have
ended and about its metre, which Coleridge claimed was
experimental and new. Though not published until 1816, the poem
was known to, and admired by, a number of Coleridge’s
acquaintances from Carlyon and others who heard him declaim Part
I in the Hartz Mountains in 1799 to his many readings of the two
parts in literary circles in the Lakes and later in London between
1800 and 1816. Several manuscripts in different hands survive; and
the two most successful poets of the age, Scott and Byron, heard it
read from a manuscript and imitated it in poems of their own which
preceded the original in their date of publication.
We have therefore a case of a poem existing in slightly variant
forms which were, in a sense, public property before publication.
(The Prelude is, of course, a greater example of the same
phenomenon.) ‘Christabel’ is a nightmare narrative with a Gothic
setting, a supernatural aspect, and an unsolved mystery. Thus far it
has affinities with ‘The Ancient Mariner’. But there are striking
differences too. The mystery in ‘Christabel’ is whether the Lady

72
Geraldine, who casts a spell on the heroine, is herself the innocent
victim of an evil enchantment or a kind of incarnation of evil. What
there is of the poem raises the question, but does not answer it.
In Part I Geraldine, whom Christabel finds in a wood by
moonlight, says she has been abducted by ‘five warriors’ and has ‘lain
entranced’ in some versions, or ‘lain in fits’ in others. She is invited
into Christabel’s father’s castle, with repeated crossing of thresholds:
‘they crossed the moat’, ‘over the threshold of the gate’, ‘they crossed
the court’, ‘they passed the hall’. Once over the final threshold and
inside Christabel’s chamber, the strange lady engages in a muttered
verbal tussle with the spirit of Christabel’s dead mother. ‘Off,
wandering mother! Peak and pine!’ says Geraldine in an echo of one
of Macbeth’s witches, as she puts a malignant spell on Christabel,
who thereafter is unable to warn her father about this dangerous
guest.
Christabel has been initiated into guilt and needs to be saved. The
question remains unanswered as to how this would have happened.
Coleridge would presumably have had to decide not only whether
Geraldine was evil in herself or under another’s spell, but also how
her influence was to be negated. At some point after 1816 he
apparently told Gillman that in the continuation which he went on
promising in every edition from 1816 on, except the last in 1834,
Geraldine was to have been defeated by the return of Christabel’s
absent lover.
We can make a guess about why Coleridge found it impossible to
finish the poem. At its centre is the heroine’s initiation into what
seems like sexual guilt. She acts hospitably and is violated by
Geraldine. Famously, Christabel gets into bed and watches Geraldine
undress. There follows the well-known stanza which caused Shelley
to scream and which influenced Keats in the dream scenes of both
‘Lamia’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’:
Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around;
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side—

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 [Are lean and old and foul of hue]
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! Shield sweet Christabel!

The line in brackets appears only in certain manuscript versions,

one of which Hazlitt saw and gleefully restored (slightly misquoting
it) in his review of the poem in 1816. He used its omission from the
published version to suggest both the strong sexual element in the
poem and Coleridge’s timidity in handling it: ‘There is something
disgusting at the bottom of his subject, which is but ill glossed over.’
Of the many parodies of ‘Christabel’, that by William Maginn in
Blackwood’s Magazine in 1819 picks up something, boldly making
Geraldine a man in disguise. The bewildered Christabel finds herself
pregnant, and Maginn asks cheekily:
Pale Christabel, who could divine
That its sire was the Ladie Geraldine?
This is all good, if not clean, fun. It also gets to the heart of
‘Christabel’ as a poem which gives expression to sexual guilt and
compulsion.
Coleridge was a prey to guilty nightmares of emotional and sexual
desires. Such experiences lie behind the pseudo-sexual attraction-
cum-repulsion in ‘Christabel’ which Hazlitt was the first to spot. The
Gothic setting with its melodramatic and potentially comic
elements—the owls, the crowing cock, the castle clock, the mastiff
bitch, the midnight excursion, the ghost of Christabel’s mother—is
used by Coleridge much as the Gothic novelists used such trappings,
as a distancing device to render the sexual and the sinful acceptable
subjects.
—Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical
Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996): pp. 182,
183–85.

JENNIFER FORD ON CHRISTABEL’S DISTURBED SLEEP

[Jennifer Ford is the author of Coleridge on Dreaming. In
the excerpt below, Ford discusses “Christabel” in terms of a

74
 poetical description of disturbed sleep, elements of which
are so disturbing that Christabel is haunted even when she
is awake. Ford cites biographical evidence that explains why
Coleridge’s treatment of sin in this poem contradicts his
moral beliefs; the poem was written during the period of
the Lyrical Ballads, a project for which Coleridge’s
contribution was to write poems of the supernatural.]
Some poems did arise from that long illness, most notably ‘The
Pains of Sleep’. Thomas Poole commented that ‘The Pains of Sleep’
was a ‘magnificent poetical description of disturbed sleep’, But other
poems included with the publication of ‘The Pains of Sleep’ may also
have arisen from the illness. Christabel, too, becomes the subject for
a poetical discussion of disturbed sleep. Her retreat to the solitude of
the woods is very similar to her retreat within a world of dream and
sleep. She ventures out, ‘a furlong from the castle gate’, to pray for
the safety of her lover, but she also ventures into the somnial space
of her mind, where, in versions of the poem drafted between 1797
and 1801, she moans and leaps as she dreams of her knight.
Coleridge, as poet, also effects a double retreat: first into the world of
imagination to write the poem, and second, into the fitful sleep of
Christabel, with which he empathises. This sleep is encountered not
merely in Christabel’s sleeping life: she recognises features of it when
she thinks she is awake. As Geraldine undresses, the narrative poet
reveals how her
silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! Her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!

Perhaps the ‘sight’ of Geraldine is akin to Christabel’s dreams of her

beloved knight, dreams which make her ‘moan and leap’ and which
cannot be freely articulated because they belong in a special somnial
space. Such visions and dreams are inexorably unutterable. When
the night has passed, and Christable awakens and greets her father,
she does not seem entirely sure that she has awoken, for the power of
her dream-world is still so strong, as is the power of Geraldine:
‘Christabel in dizzy trance, / Stumbling on the unsteady ground— /
Shudder’d aloud, with a hissing sound.’ The dizzy trance, and the
earlier references to moaning and groaning in sleep, suggest that
Christabel is no stranger to disturbed sleep: in fact, with ‘open eyes’

75
she is described as ‘Asleep, and dreaming fearfully’. In this dizzy
trance, Christabel is said to be bereft of her thoughts—‘her thoughts
are gone’—in much the same way as, when she first awoke, she was
in such a ‘perplexity of mind’ that she thought she had sinned. The
remnants of her uneasy dream, and the ease with which the somnial
space is apparently invoked in waking life by Geraldine, are
significantly stronger in the earlier drafts of the poem. Her retreat
into the forest and into fearful dreams closely parallels Coleridge’s
notion of a ‘wild storehouse’ of poems, a space which houses poetic
materials.
Despite his letter to Poole, Coleridge was not always confident of
his ability to gain access to those strange and often painful regions of
the mind. Often, he did not want to gain access at all, for those
regions were totally incompatible with his conscious morality. There
are countless instances of the shocking realisation that there seem to
be two different parts of the self, a division which is most potently
manifested in and through the processes of dreaming and in dreams
themselves. This realisation was particularly evident in times of deep
despair, caused by his opium taking. In a letter to Matthew Coates,
from December 1803, Coleridge complains of
the Horrors of my Sleep, and Night-screams (so loud & so frequent as
to make me almost a Nuisance in my own house [)] seemed to carry
beyond mere Body—counterfeiting, as it were, the Tortures of Guilt,
and what we are told of the Punishments of a spiritual World—I am at
length a Convalescent—but dreading such another Bout as much as I
dare dread a Thing which has not immediate connection with my
Conscience.
His genuine lack of knowledge as to why the ‘Horrors’ of his sleep
visit him is counterbalanced by the implied realisation that those
same horrors must be in some way connected to his conscience and
to his own behaviours. Illness and the onslaught of yet more
dreadful dreams are described as parallel fears. The want of a
connection between what is dreamt and what is conscious to the self
during waking life becomes indicative of a self which is perceived as
fundamentally dislodged and disrupted: the experience of dreams,
an experience which is intensified in nightmares, creates the
potential for the paradoxically total fragmentation of the self. That
Coleridge dreads and describes such a dream as ‘a Thing which has
no immediate connection with my Conscience’ (my emphasis)
immediately indicates the extent to which the dream can divide the

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mind into two entirely different regions with entirely different
moralities: those ‘Tortures of Guilt, and what we are told of the
instrumentallyity of a series of appropriate and symbolic visual and
auditual Images spontaneously rising before him, and these so clear
and so distinct as at length to become overpower his first suspicions
of their subjective nature and to become objective for him—i.e. in his
own belief of their kind and origin—still the Thoughts, the
Reasonings, the Grounds, the Deductions, the Facts illustrative or in
proof, and the Conclusions, remain the same!

What Coleridge extracts from his hypothesis is both the validity of

Swedenborg’s facts and conclusions and the incorrect reasoning
under which those conclusions were formed. Because Swedenborg
was in a unique dreaming state, and because there were certain
faculties within his mind that were still functioning as though he
were fully awake, he was unable to distinguish what he saw from
what he thought he saw: images both clear and distinct from his
own mind are eventually seen as objective. . . .

As a poet whose primary concerns in the Lyrical Ballads were to

be ‘directed to persons and characters supernatural’, Coleridge
shows an interest in witchcraft and apparitions that becomes even
more intriguing. A comment he made about Christabel is revealing
of his thoughts on ghosts and apparitions. In October 1804, in
a cryptic note written three years after the poem, he makes a
tantalising reference to Geraldine’s character: ‘Saturday Morning . . .
a most tremendous Rain storm with Lightning & Thunder, one
Clap of which burst directly over . . . Vivid flashes in mid day, the
terror without the beauty. —A ghost by day time / Geraldine.’ Years
later, on 1 July 1833, he claimed that the reason why he had not yet
finished Christabel was not because he did not know how to finish
it, but rather because he could not ‘carry on with equal success the
execution of the idea—the most difficult . . . that can be attempted
to Romantic Poetry— . . . witchery by daylight’. Although this
comment has often been seen as another attempt to rationalise
why he had not completed the poem, it is also highly likely that
Coleridge’s reasoning is quite correct. For over thirty years, he
attempted to understand the often cited/sighted occurrences of
ghosts, witchcraft activities and visions. If he had not yet
ascertained in his own mind the exact explanation for such
phenomena, he could not finish his poem.

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 His description of Geraldine as a ‘ghost by day time’ sheds light
on his thinking on dreams and visions, and the ways in which an
understanding of witchcraft could further elucidate the mysteries
of dreams. His comment also reveals the important connections he
perceived between the studies of witchcraft and those on
dreaming. From the time that Geraldine encounters Christabel by
the ‘broad breasted old oak tree’, and particularly those times
surrounding awakening and sleeping, it seems that it is indeed the
‘true witching time’.
—Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the
Medical Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998):
pp. 46–47, 96–97.

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 Thematic Analysis of
“Dejection: An Ode”
Written and published on October 4, 1802, upon the occasion of
William Wordsworth’s wedding, “Dejection: An Ode” was originally
a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson. Coleridge was hopelessly in love
with her, although at the same time he was unhappily married to
Sara Fricker. (Coleridge once stated in a letter that Sara Fricker was
the one “whom I love best of all created Beings,” but in fact, they
were ill-suited for one another both emotionally and creatively.)
At the time of the poem’s creation, Coleridge was also beset by a
series of troubles: a succession of debilitating illnesses, increased
dependence upon opium, and anxieties about what he conceived to
be a decline in his poetic imagination. These themes can all be found
in the “Dejection Ode.” The poem laments dreams and desires that
have seemingly passed.
Coleridge wrote the poem immediately after hearing the
beginning of Wordsworth’s great poem on the same subject, “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality.” In the early stanzas of that poem,
Wordsworth imagines himself as a child seeing the world “apparelled
in celestial light,” yet knows that while “[t]he sunshine is a glorious
birth; / But yet I know, where’er I go, / That there hath past away a
glory from the earth.” Coleridge sought to articulate these same
feelings. He transformed an intimate letter into a more “public”
arena in which he could analyze and come to terms with his own
dejection about the eclipse of his poetic imagination. Ironically,
despite Coleridge’s anxieties about poetic failure, in “Dejection: An
Ode” he brilliantly uses his poetic powers to interweave the themes
of lost imagination and disillusioned love.
The structure of the poem is yet another vital interpretive key. In
its most simple terms, the genre of this poem is an ode, a poem that
in the ancient Greek world was intended to be sung or chanted. The
ode was a complexly organized poem that was created for important
state functions and ceremonies; thus, it was a mode of public
address. The format of “Dejection: An Ode” is based on Pindar’s
odes, poems that were written between 522 and 442 B.C. as formal
celebrations of the panhellenic athletic festivals. This poetry
commemorated athletic victories, which the Greeks held in high

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esteem as the greatest of human achievements. The odes included an
announcement of victory, praise for the champion, an invocation to
the gods, and praise of the athlete’s city and family. Also
incorporated within these celebratory poems were reminders of the
victor’s mortality, a prayer to ward off bad luck, an awareness of the
pitfalls of vanity and the dangers of provoking envy in the gods, and
the importance of inherent excellence. Pindar’s odes are written in
regular stanzas—a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode. The
strophe is the initial component that the Greek chorus chanted while
moving from one side of the stage to another, followed by a
metrically-identical antistrophe, which was chanted in
accompaniment to a reverse movement and lead up finally to the
epode, which the chorus sung while standing still.
Coleridge admired the “profound Logic” and organization of
Pindar’s odes. Ultimately, however, he transformed his verse-letter
into an irregular ode according to the English tradition that
substituted the tripartite stanzas into a structure of turn, counter-
turn, and stand, a series of balanced opposites. This genre had
attained popularity in the 17th century with Abraham Cowley’s
Pindarique Odes, in which Cowley attempted to capture the spirit
and tone of Pindar rather than formally imitating the classical poet.
In the 18th century, the great formal odes began with John Dryden
in such works as “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day.” The ode became the
vehicle for expressing the sublime, lofty thoughts of intellectual and
spiritual concerns. Coleridge combined the formality of the genre
with irregular lines that are relaxed and colloquial, enabling the poet
to move between external world and the world of his imagination.
“Dejection: An Ode” begins with the ominous lines from the
“Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,” which serve to introduce a mysterious
and disconcerting sense of vague yet ominous foreboding. “And I
fear, I fear, my master dear! / We shall have a deadly storm.” In using
the ballad as a preface to the ode, Coleridge acknowledges the
English appropriation of the ancient genre, as well as his own
creative intervention. An ode would have originally been intended
for an aristocratic audience attending a state function, while the
ballad is a simple song based on “folklore” and transmitted orally
among illiterate people. Unlike the ode of antiquity, the ballad does
not give attention to details of setting but rather focuses on dramatic
intensity, which aims to stir up the emotions of its listeners.

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Coleridge’s creative power took these two disparate literary forms
and united them.
In the first lines of the first stanza, the speaker formally
acknowledges the validity of the English ode when he speculates
whether the bard of “Sir Patrick Spence” really could predict the
weather: “Well! If the bard was weather-wise / . . . This night, so
tranquil now, will not go hence / Unroused by winds.” This is more
than mere speculation on the speaker’s part; it is a wish that perhaps
he will receive the necessary yet violent gesture to stir his own
imagination. As things are at the moment, he is almost lifeless,
languishing beneath “the dull sobbing draft” while he prays that the
wind will blow “upon the strings of this Aeolian lute” (a popular
metaphor for poetic inspiration). As the velocity of the storm
increases, his wish intensifies as he hopes that what is foretold will
come to pass. “I see the old Moon foretelling / The coming-on of
rain and squally blast/ And oh! That even now the gust were
swelling, / And the slant night shower driving loud and fast / . . .
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!” The speaker
is inspired and enchanted by the sublime aspects of Nature. The
majesty of torrential rains will resurrect his dejected spirit back to
life. The poet uses the external world as a barometer of his own
internal state. He demonstrates an ability to move quickly and
adeptly between these two “places.”
In stanza 2, the speaker’s plaintive voice discusses an almost
death-in-life state of being: “A grief without a pang, void, dear, and
drear / A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief / Which finds no
nature outlet, no relief.” The arid and stilted atmosphere depicted
here bears strong resemblance to the “painted ocean” of “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner.” The speaker’s “genial spirits” have
abandoned him, so that his body and spirit have lost their vital
connection.
The speaker also reveals another deep longing as he addresses
what we may assume is the object of his unobtainable love, Sara
Hutchinson. “O Lady!, in this wan and heartless mood, / . . . Have I
been gazing on the western sky, / . . . And still I gaze—and with how
blank an eye!” His unrequited love is poignantly expressed as the
speaker describes how very far he is from fulfilling his desire: “Those
stars, / . . . Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: / . . . I
see, not feel, how beautiful they are!” So dejected is the speaker’s

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spirits that he seems to be consigned to an eternal punishment of
merely looking, yet never arriving, at his destination. Nothing less
than rebirth can be the antidote for such severe depression, and he
has little hope of being united with the woman whom he addresses.
“O Lady! We receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does
Nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud.” The
speaker’s juxtaposition of wedding garments with images of burial
rites points to the speed with which one set of circumstances can be
radically altered to its opposite.
Stanza 5 brings a slight shift in tone, for here we find at least the
memory of happier days. The speaker remembers a former time
when body and soul were united. This shift in atmosphere is
signaled through the magnificent and brilliant images of light, both
natural and celestial: “This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, /
This beautiful and beauty-making power. / . . . Joy, Lady! Is the spirit
and the power, / Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower / A new
Earth and new Heaven.” Nevertheless, a great space still yawns
between the speaker and the fulfillment of his wishes, a distance that
is expressed with great poignancy, alluding to the fading visionary
light of the young man in Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode”: “There
was a time when, though my path was rough, / This joy within me
dallied with distress.” In an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
the speaker expresses a wish for a magical transformation of a tragic
turn of events into a joyous outcome: “And all misfortunes were but
as the stuff / Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness.” Thus
the stage is set for a complete reversal of the speaker’s psychological
state in the next long stanza, Stanza 6.
Stanza 7 begins with the speaker banishing the demons with
which he has been bedeviled. “Hence, viper thoughts, that coil
around my mind, / Reality’s dark dream!” He takes determined
action to lift himself out of his dejection. “I turn from you, and
listen to the wind, / Which long has raved unnoticed.” The speaker is
now ready to take responsibility, “to receive what we give,” to become
a better listener of Nature’s song. Instead of hearing the “tortured
lengthened out” “that lute sent forth,” and “the rushing of an host in
rout, / With groans, of trampled men, with smarting wounds,” he
will ignore all such thoughts of his besieged psyche. Thereby, he will
end the inner turmoil that produces self-defeating thoughts. “But
hush! There is a pause of deepest silence! / . . . It tells another tale,

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with sounds less deep and loud! / A tale of less affright, / And
tempered with delight.”
“Dejection: An Ode” ends on a peaceful note. As the speaker gazes
on his sleeping lover in Stanza 8, we are reminded of the third and
last part of the Grecian ode in which the chorus stood still. Although
we are not told that the speaker has regained all that he believes he
has lost, he does find peace and solace as he contemplates both his
lover and the gifts nature has the power to bestow. “Joy lift her spirit,
joy attune her voice; / To her may all things live, from pole to pole, /
Their life the eddying of her living soul!” There is healing to be had
in the quiet contemplation of Nature. 

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 Critical Views on
“Dejection: An Ode”
JOHN SPENCER HILL ON CLASSICAL AND ENGLISH ODE
TRADITIONS
[John Spencer Hill is the author of Infinity, Faith and Time:
Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature and John
Milton, Poet, Priest and Prophet: A Study of Divine Vocation
in Milton’s Poetry and Prose. In the excerpt below from the
chapter, “‘Dejection: An Ode,’” Hill discusses Coleridge’s
poem in terms of the classical and English ode traditions,
and the delicate balance of formal and informal
characteristics in “Dejection.”
According to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language
(1755), ‘the ode is either of the greater or less kind. The less is
characterised by sweetness and ease; the greater by sublimity,
rapture, and quickness of transition.’ The distinction that Johnson is
making is that between the literary heirs of Horace and those of
Pindar. Gilbert Highet distinguishes the two traditions in this way:
Among the lyricists who follow classical inspiration, consciously or
unconsciously, some are descendants of Pindar, some of Horace. The
Pindarics admire passion, daring, and extravagance. Horace’s
followers prefer reflection, moderation, economy. Pindaric odes follow
no pre-established routine, but soar and dive and veer as the wind
catches their wing. Horatian lyrics work on quiet, short, well-balanced
systems. Pindar represents the ideals of aristocracy, careless courage
and the generous heart. Horace is a bourgeois, prizing thrift, care,
caution, the virtue of self-control. Even the music we can hear through
the odes of the two poets and their successors is different. Pindar loves
the choir, the festival, the many-footed dance. Horace is a solo singer,
sitting in a pleasant room or quiet garden with his lyre. . . .
By 1802 Coleridge had composed a number of odes, ranging from
the turgid ‘Pindarick’ sublime of ‘Ode to the Departing Year’ (1796)
to the meditative Horatian accents of ‘Ode to Tranquillity,’ which
appeared in the Morning Post of 4 December 1801. From its first
publication in October 1802, Coleridge called his ‘Dejection’ an ode.
It is, like Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, an
irregular English Pindaric. And yet it has always existed somewhat

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uneasily within the confines of this generic description. On the one
hand, it is one of the most regular odes in the language: ‘five-sixths
of its lines’, as John Jump has pointed out, ‘are either iambic
pentameters or alexandrines, nearly four-fifths of them iambic
pentameters’. In addition, it shares a significant number of
characteristics with Coleridge’s Conversation Poems; and some
critics—notably G. M. Harper and (with reservations) George
Watson—are inclined to group it generically with these earlier
poems, while M. H. Abrams (imitating the Augustan distinction
between ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ odes) prefers to assign both the best of
the Conversation Poems and ‘Dejection: An Ode’ to a new lyric
category which he denominates ‘the greater Romantic lyric’. On the
other hand, however, there is the fact that Coleridge persistently
referred to ‘Dejection’ as an ode and the fact that the poem is
(despite other influences) recognisably part of the English Pindaric
tradition. While no one, I think, would deny that Coleridge’s
‘conversational’ mode has left its mark on the poem and is largely
responsible for its being so different in many ways from earlier
Pindarics in English, it is equally apparent that ‘Dejection: An Ode’
cannot properly be called a Conversation Poem. Its tone, for one
thing, while genial and (at least superficially) familiar, is not intimate
and is exalted and dignified to a degree that has no parallel in the
Conversation Poems of 1795–8. Its form and style, moreover, are
radically unlike those of the earlier poems: it is divided into formal
stanzas rather than into apparently artless verse-paragraphs; and,
while iambic pentameter provides the prosodic base, there is no
blank verse in the poem at all—rhyme is employed throughout and
line-lengths are varied. In short, ‘Dejection: An Ode’ is a sort of
middle thing between a traditional Pindaric and a Coleridgean
Conversation Poem; and I would agree with A. H. Fairbanks that the
poem ‘has fair claim to status as the first distinctively Romantic
ode’—a status achieved by the ‘synthesis of the magnitude and
dynamics of the ode with the personal style and immediacy of the
conversation poem’.
‘Dejection: An Ode’ is a poem of paradox, of balanced opposites—
the formal and the informal, imaginative loss and imaginative
power—held in delicate equilibrium. The magnificent opening
stanza (lines 1–20), which merits citation in full, subtly establishes
the antitheses that the poem develops as it progresses:

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 Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,
Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this Æolian lute,
Which better far were mute.
For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light,
(With swimming phantom light o’erspread
But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
I see the old Moon, in her lap, foretelling
The coming-on of rain and squally blast.
And oh! that even now the gust were swelling,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!
Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad,
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!
These lines, relaxed and colloquial, giving a sense of ambling,
meandering thought, are unobtrusively but firmly controlled by a
formal rhyme-scheme that never threatens or interferes with the
illusion of genial spontaneity. The formality of rhyme and stanza-
form are modulated by an abundance of enjambment and by varied
metrical patterns that imitate the ebb and flow of thought and of the
rising and falling breeze. The imagery, too, moves effortlessly from the
external world to the internal demesne of the poet’s mind, blending
outness with inscape: the lute, for example, is both an actual Aeolian
harp and a metaphor of mind, and the rising wind is both real and a
symbol of inspiration. And there is in this stanza, as William Walsh
points out, ‘a constant transition from particular to general and from
general to particular: reflection feeds on the concrete and the concrete
holds within it the impulse of the general’. Thus, the moon, while
mysteriously overspread with a vague ‘phantom light’, is yet defined
with mathematical precision as ‘rimmed and circled by a silver
thread’. The surety of the present moment and the present scene are
counterbalanced by contingency and a deep-set apprehension of
what the future holds; the rising wind, while invoked, is yet feared—
for it strikes a deeper chord that reverberates through the stanza
from the ominous prolepsis of the epigraph:

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 And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
Will the wind, when it comes, be creative or destructive? And the
moon, too—the new moon with the old moon in her arms—is
similarly ambiguous: does it signify rebirth or death, what is yet to
come or what has passed away? Poised between expectation and
foreboding, between vivid awareness of the world and an apathetic
inability to respond to it, the opening stanza establishes the
paradoxes which the following stanzas will explore.
—John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the
Major Poems and the Biographia Literaria (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1984): pp. 198–201.

HAROLD BLOOM ON CONTINUITY IN THE POEM

[Harold Bloom is an eminent scholar and has written
extensively on all the Romantic poets. His books include
The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in the Romantic Tradition
(1971), The Anxiety of Influence: The Theory of Poetry
(1975) and Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from
the Bible to the Present (1989). In the excerpt below from a
chapter on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bloom argues for a
continuity in “Dejection: An Ode” based on an irreversible
human process that accepts the permanent loss of
imaginative powers, implicitly confirmed by nature.]
There is only one voice in Dejection: An Ode. In this poem Coleridge
does not argue with himself, though he has need to do so. But the
voice is turned against itself with an intensity that only the greatest
poets have been able to bring over into language. The ode’s
continuity as argument presents no problems; Dejection overtly
rejects the dialectic of Wordsworth’s memory-as-salvation. The logic
of Dejection is that human process is irreversible: imaginative loss is
permanent, and nature intimates to us our own mortality always.

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 The puzzle of Dejection is why and how it rejects as imaginative
argument the Wordsworthian myth. The myth was initially a
Coleridgean creation, in the “conversation poems” of 1795–1798,
where it is beautifully stated, though always with misgivings. The
“why” of rejection belongs to a study of how Coleridge’s poetry itself
discourses on poetic limits. The “how” is a lesson in the Romantic
uses of self-directed argument.
The epigraph to Wordsworth’s Intimations ode is a motto of
natural piety. Against its rainbow Coleridge sets the natural emblem
most in opposition: the new moon, with the old moon in its arms.
In Dejection the storm is predicted, comes on, and finally is “but a
mountain-birth,” sudden and soon over. The poem’s new moon is
the Wordsworth surrogate, “Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my
choice”; its old moon, Coleridge himself. The principal difference,
then, between the two odes is that Wordsworth uses one protagonist
passing through several states of being while Coleridge undertakes
the lesser imaginative task and risks pathos by doubling the human
element yet keeping the voice single. The poem’s speaker is doomed
to imaginative death; all hope for joy devolves upon the “Lady.”
By evading individual progression-through-contraries, Coleridge
has no ostensible need for poetic logic. But this evasion could not in
itself make a poem of any value; flat personal despair joined to
altruism and benevolence is hardly a formula for poetic power.
Dejection is imaginatively impressive because Coleridge does not
succeed in altogether distinguishing himself from the Lady whose
joy he celebrates. The curious and yet extraordinarily successful
effect is like that of a saint seeking to disavow Christian doctrine by
avowing its efficacy for others, less sinful than himself.
Study of Dejection: An Ode can well begin backwards, with a
consideration of the lines that enable the poem to end on the word
“rejoice”:
To her may all things live, from pole to pole,
Their life the eddying of her living soul!
The image of the eddy is the summary figure of the poem: the flux
of nature throughout has prepared for it. Joy, as the effluence of Life,
overflows as sound, light, cloud, shower; as a composite luminous
and melodic mist of the soul; now solid, now liquid, now vaporous,
now pure light or pure sound. This is repetitious summary, but the

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poem’s repetitiveness is meaningful here. The myth of Wordsworth’s
Child is being rejected; the glory comes and goes, without relation to
infancy, childhood, youth, maturity. The progression is simply linear
and it is irreversible:
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth.
The eddy has stopped its pole-to-pole movement; the cycle of joy
is over. Taken literally, Coleridge’s myth of dejection is a bizarre
reinforcement of a single stage in the poetic argument of Resolution
and Independence:
We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.
If Dejection had only its Stanzas I to VI and its climactic in Stanza
VIII, it could not be defended from the charge of pathos. The usually
evaded Stanza VII, which is generally considered a transitional mood
piece, controls the poem’s logic and equips it to avoid self-
indulgence. The structure of the poem is in two units: Stanzas I, VII,
VIII, and Stanzas II–VI. The first group are respectively devoted to
the pre-storm calm, the storm itself, and the subsequent calm, which
is analogous to the peace at the end of a formalized tragedy. The
middle stanzas are argument, between Coleridge-as-Wordsworthian
and Coleridge-in-dejection, with the latter dialectically triumphant.
The connecting unit between the groups opens Stanza VII, in which
the “viper thoughts” of II-VI are dismissed as “Reality’s dark dream”:
I turn from you, and listen to the wind,
Which long has raved unnoticed.
As he listens to the wind, he resolves his poem. The resolution is
purely dialectical in that the stanza offers a set of assumptions that
include the opposing Wordsworthian and Coleridgean views on the
relationship between external nature and the poet’s creative joy.
Certainly the resolution is indirect, and perhaps too ingenious. But
the curious seventh stanza cannot be ignored as an embarrassing
digression; it is the crisis of the poem, akin to the silence between
the eighth and ninth stanzas of the Intimations ode. There the

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dialectic rises to poetic finality because it is a dialectic of discourse
itself. The conflict of discourse and silence is resolved in favor of
silence, with the result that the discourse, when it begins again, can
move in reverse and state the contrary of the preceding stanzas.
—Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English
Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961): pp.
222–24.

REEVE PARKER ON THE POEM’S FORMAL ELEMENTS IN

RELATION TO ITS INTENTION
[Reeve Parker is one of the editors of The Triumph of Style:
Modes of Non-Fiction. In the excerpt below from the
chapter, “‘Dejection: An Ode,’” Parker discusses the final
version of the poem (published on Wordsworth’s wedding
day) in terms of the relationship between formal elements
and intention.]
The goal of my reading in this chapter is to describe and interpret in
the final version of “Dejection: An Ode” what Coleridge might have
called the order of imitation—in other words to arrive at some
description of the “general” and “universal” in the poem—and thus
to argue that the poem was not merely the result of a purging of
emotion in the interests of discretion. To deplore, for the sake of
confessional sincerity, the imposition of form as a falsifying of actual
behavior and experience is to misconstrue the processes of conscious
(and unconscious) self-expression. In the preface to his 1796 Poems
Coleridge argued for a salutary egotism in poetic composition,
contending that “the communicativeness of our nature leads us to
describe our sorrows” and that from this exerted intellectual activity
“a pleasure results which is gradually associated and mingles as a
corrective with the painful subject of the description.” As we have
seen, Coleridge thought that such egotistic conversation could be
heuristic, especially in the heightened order of verse, and that the
discovery toward which the poet won his difficult way was not only
intellectual comprehension of the distress but also release of the

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mind’s processive energies, the life that opposed the death-in-life of
melancholy solipsism. About a year after publishing “Dejection: An
Ode” in the Morning Post, Coleridge explored the old ground of his
1796 preface in a notebook entry that has the excitement of fresh
recognition: “One excellent use of communication of Sorrows to a
Friend is this: that in relating what ails us we ourselves first know
exactly what the real Grief is—& see it for itself, in its own form &
limits. Unspoken Grief is a misty medley, of which the real affliction
only plays the first fiddle—blows the horn, to a scattered mob of
obscure feelings.” Though the remark emphasizes how
communication leads one to articulate and focus what is otherwise
scattered and dim, when it is read in conjunction with another
notebook entry almost immediately following, we can see that
Coleridge is also centrally concerned with the pleasurable activity
resulting from such effort at meditative consciousness. Analysis and
creative release work hand in hand to alleviate the initial
wretchedness:
Some painful Feeling, bodily or of the mind / some form or feeling
has recalled a past misery to the Feeling, & not to the conscious
memory—I brood over what has befallen of evil / what is the worst
that could befall me? What is that Blessing which is most present &
perpetual to my Fancy and Yearnings? Sara! Sara!—The Loss then of
this first bodies itself out to me / —& if I have not heard from you
very recently, & if the last letter had not happened to be full of explicit
Love & Feeling, then I conjure up Shadows into Substances—& am
miserable / Misery conjures up other Forms, & binds them into Tales
& Events—activity is always Pleasure—the Tale grows pleasanter—& at
length you come to me / you are by my bed side, in some lonely Inn,
where I lie deserted—there you have found me—there you are weeping
over me!—Dear, dear, Woman! . . .
As in “Frost at Midnight,” in “Dejection: An Ode” the progress
enacted is from voicing distress, by uneasy and fanciful toying with
a superstitious belief, to discerning how the terms of that
superstition and the imagery associated with them can sustain a
different and more substantial creed. In no other meditative poem
besides “Frost at Midnight” does imagery concerned with the
eddying energies of the natural world work with more subtle or
ingenious cogency. That imager y and what has, somewhat
misleadingly, been called the controlling metaphor of the poem—
the storm—warrant close attention.

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 The most remarkable image is, certainly, that of the moon in the
opening stanza:
Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,
Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this Æolian lute,
Which better far were mute. . . .
Coleridge’s attention, both here and in the epigraph from the “Ballad
of Sir Patrick Spence,” to the lore of superstition introduces a mood
of uneasy reflection (like that at the opening of “Frost at Midnight”
or “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”) in words that, as Donald
Davie has observed, “slide down a long scale of emotion from
something not far short of geniality to a desperate melancholy.”
—Reeve Parker, Coleridge’s Meditative Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1975): pp. 181–184.

SUSAN MILITZER LUTHER ON INTERPRETING THE POEM

[Susan Militzer Luther is the author of Christabel as Dream
Reverie (1976). In this excerpt, Luther discusses a little-
known Coleridge poem entitled “The Garden of Boccaccio”
and explains its usefulness in interpreting “Dejection: An
Ode.”]
In The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1960) Marshall Suther
praises “The Garden of Boccaccio” as “Coleridge’s version of ‘Sailing
to Byzantium’”; and in Visions of Xanadu (1965) Suther goes so far
as to call it “the last real poem [Coleridge] wrote.” In Coleridge the
Poet (1966) George Watson even more resoundingly asserts that the
poem “ought to be better known; it ought, in fact, to be the poem
first turned to, after the conversation poems, the ‘Mariner’, ‘Kubla
Khan’ and ‘Christabel’, to confirm the stature of [Coleridge’s] poetic
art.” Yet “The Garden of Boccaccio” has still been virtually erased
from most surveys of the Coleridgean landscape. . . .

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 Written in 1828, the poem was first published in The Keepsake for
1829, an annual “Gaudy Book,” as Coleridge called it in a letter to
Alaric Watts. A poem-about-a-picture, “The Garden of Boccaccio” at
first sight appears to be little more than an appreciation of its
companion illustration, an engraving of Thomas Stothard’s
depiction of the garden to which Neifile leads her companions on
the Third Day of the Decameron. Given its self-proclaimed allegiance
to “fancy,” its heroic couplets, its occasionally coy, archaic diction
and its tincture of “romance,” “The Garden of Boccaccio” does in a
way seem precious, no more than an “exquisite design” or topiary-
piece straight out of the land of “faery” evoked by the volume in
which it first appeared.
Coleridge himself expressed the rather modest hope that readers
such as Watts might find it “a vigorous Copy of Verses.” One
presumes that Coleridge meant “set” of verses, “modeled after”
Stothard’s drawing; but the term “Copy” hints at the poem’s place in
a larger, reproductive design. It appears again in the collective
editions of 1829 and 1834, where it immediately follows “The
Improvisatore,” there titled “New Thoughts on Old Subjects.” And
“The Garden of Boccaccio” itself, as George Whalley and George
Ridenour some time ago pointed out, is a late response to, or
elaboration of, themes central in canonical poems, especially
“Dejection: An Ode.” Not simply imitative, echoic or allusive, the
poem contains an element of self-parody, enacting what Linda
Hutcheon calls “a stylistic confrontation, a modern recoding which
establishes difference at the heart of similarity.”
This “difference at the heart of similarity” appears in the poem’s
first lines, when the poet-narrator explains that,
Of late, in one of those most weary hours,
When life seems emptied of all genial powers,
A dreary mood, which he who ne’er has known
May bless his happy lot, I sate alone;
And, from the numbing spell to win relief,
Call’d on the PAST for thought of glee or grief.
In vain! bereft alike of grief and glee,
I sate and cow’r’d o’er my own vacancy!
And as I watch’d the dull continuous ache,
Which, all else slumb’ring, seem’d alone to wake;
O Friend! long wont to notice yet conceal,
And soothe by silence what words cannot heal,

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 I but half saw that quiet hand of thine
Place on my desk this exquisite design,
Boccaccio’s Garden and its faery,
The love, the joyaunce, and the gallantry!
An IDYLL, with Boccaccio’s spirit warm,
Framed in the silent poesy of form.
His “dreary mood” recalls the “wan and heartless mood” of
“Dejection,” while the “dull continuous ache” points backward to the
“dull pain” and its avatar, the “dull sobbing draft” which sounds the
strings of the aeolian harp. In “The Garden of Boccaccio” the
narrator describes one of those times when “life seems emptied of all
genial powers”; in “Dejection” the speaker’s “genial spirits fail.”
Further, the appeal to “joyaunce” in “The Garden of Boccaccio”
evokes not only the many references to “joy” and (though fewer) to
“joyance” throughout Coleridge’s poems, but the impassioned paean
to Joy in strophe V of the ode. Both works describe a lack of
animation, a state of spiritual and emotional “vacancy,” a “void”
which “relief ” cannot enter, proscribed by the “numbing spell.” “The
Garden of Boccaccio”’s transformation of the ode’s failing “genial
spirits” into “genial powers” which seem to have been “emptied” from
the vessel of life brings to the surface the connection with “genius”
latent, as Paul Magnuson points out, in the earlier phrase, making it
clear that here, too, anima, the poet’s “shaping spirit,” not simply
lack of “mirth,” is at stake. In a further absorption of the personal
elements of the earlier poem (and the verse-letter which preceded it)
into the topos of vocation, “The Garden of Boccaccio” dissolves the
earlier addressees into multiples of the Muse: “Sara” and the “Lady”
of verse-letter and ode become a non-gendered “Friend” (Anne
Gillman, though the text does not identify her) and the muse-
maidens of picture and “mazy page.” “Edmund,” the addressee of the
first published version of “Dejection,” a name substituted for
“Wordsworth,” divides into the “gentle artist” Stothard and
Boccaccio himself. But the elaborative shrinking of Joy into
“joyaunce” (the only instance of this spelling in Coleridge’s poems)
indicates how far “The Garden of Boccaccio” has come from its
predecessor’s dark intensity of feeling as well as of generic ambition.
The insertion of the u into a term which already marks itself as
belonging to myth and “romance” underscores the poem’s
artificiality, its remoteness from “life” and its identity as a made

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thing rather than a serious, straightforward outpouring of “the
passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”
This change in emphasis does not simply represent an icefall,
however. The poem’s substitution of the figure of form—“the silent
poesy of form”—for the figure of voice resolves in muta poesis the
split “voice” of “Dejection” and critiques the naive egotism of the
trope, or myth, of self-originating voice. That is, the trope of form
undercuts some of the pretensions of the ode as form. Paul Fry
suggests that “the aim of the ode is to recover and usurp the voice to
which hymns defer: not merely to participate in the presence of
voice but to be the voice.” The poem-about-a-picture, or ekphrasis,
on the other hand, is more modest in its usurpations. It unabashedly
eschews originality and singularity to explore the originary power of
elaboration, of secondariness.
—Susan Militzer Luther, “The Lost Garden of Coleridge,” The
Wordsworth Circle 22, no. 1 (Winter 1991): pp. 24–25.

TILOTTAMA RAJAN ON THE POEM’S AMBIGUITY

[Tilottama Rajan is the author of The Supplement of
Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and a
contributing editor of Romanticism, History and the
Possibility of Genre: Reforming Literature 1789–1837. In the
excerpt below from the chapter “Image and Reality in
Coleridge’s Lyric Poetr y,” Rajan discusses the
interpretational ambiguities in “Dejection: An Ode.” She
attributes these to the equivocal evidence of whether the
speaker has solved his crisis, namely whether he has found
unity between nature and his own newly-restored
imaginative powers.]
One of the central ambiguities in “Dejection: An Ode” arises from
an uncertainty about whether epiphany is created by a cooperation
between the light reflected and the light bestowed, or by a projection
of light from within. The crisis of the poem arises precisely from a

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failure in mediation: the failure of the landscape, whose beauty is
only the calm before the storm, to provide for the poet’s feelings an
outward language that is continuous rather than intermittent. What
is apparent in the poem is that all seasons are not sweet, as Coleridge
had once claimed. Thus the poet seeks to separate himself from
nature, to take onto himself the blame for his dejection in order to
reclaim the initiative of renewed vision. In the concluding
celebration of Asra he claims for imagination the power to transcend
distance and sterility, and to represent an ideal that is absent through
an act of unmediated vision. Such vision is purely inward, liberated
from the need for physical perception, and therefore from the reality
which might confirm it but might also expose it.
It is often observed that the paradox of this poem lies in
Coleridge’s ability to create despite his professed inability to do so.
But in fact almost the reverse is true. The dilemma of the poem is
that there is no consolation in the power of imagination to
constitute an ideal that is not fulfilled in the prose of the world. The
poet is able to “give” life to Asra, but does not receive it back into the
creating self, which remains estranged from the radical innocence
that it projects. The existence of this dejected self constitutes a denial
of the “life” given by it, and constantly exposes the ideal as illusory
from the vantage point of the real. Precisely because he has liberated
the imaginary from the real, the poet has made impossible the
remarriage of vision and actuality demanded by the mediatory
assumptions of the conversation mode, if not by poetry itself as a
communicative mode. Or, to put it differently, such mediation is
achievable only at the cost of reimplicating the desire for the
imaginary in the knowledge of the real.
“Dejection” goes considerably further than other poems in
recognizing the impotence of radical idealism: in recognizing, with
Hegel, that the act of envisioning a nonexistent ideal is, in its very
nature, “a dual state of mind” rather than a liberating act. Other
Romantics tacitly admit this linkage between desire and knowledge
in imaging hope and despair as twins rather than antitheses, as
shadow and substance or concave and convex. To imagine an ideal
that existed in an autonomous realm of illusion would be to imagine
that impossible phenomenon which Sartre calls a “shut imaginary
consciousness.” Such a consciousness is completely unconscious of
anything outside itself, and is therefore without “being-in-the-

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world.” Because it exists in a purely imaginary world turned in on
itself through dream, death, or fiction, without any conception of
reality, it is closed to the insight that might perceive it as illusory. But
what is apparent in a poem such as “Dejection,” and more explicitly
in the late poems, is that there is no such state of consciousness. The
imagination can construct an ideal that does not exist, but it must
then deconstruct this ideal from the vantage point of existence. A
poem either accepts this deconstructive potential within
imagination or condemns itself to be a self-frustrated literary
structure, which projects within itself aesthetic norms that are
discontinuous with the experience it dramatizes.
—Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980): pp. 250–252.

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 Thematic Analysis of
“Kubla Khan”
Published in May 1816, the composition date of this enigmatic
poem has been much debated, ranging from the summer of 1797 to
the spring of 1800; the fall of 1797, however, is generally accepted as
the date of composition. In the preface of the poem, the poet
indicates he had written the poem during the summer of 1797 under
conditions he clearly delineates. According to Coleridge, he was
living in a “lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton” and “ill
in health,” had fallen asleep in his chair while reading about the
historical Kubla Khan, founder of the 13th-century Mongol dynasty
in China, in Purchas’ Pilgrimage, written in 1613. Coleridge tells us
he dreamt of all the luxurious images depicted in Purchas, of
“pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames . . . and in the middest
thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from
place to place.” Upon awakening, with pen and paper in hand in
order to record his dream, Coleridge was interrupted by a visitor
from Porlock and detained for over an hour, so that when the
stranger left, Coleridge’s recollection of his vision had all but
disappeared. To express the lost vision, Coleridge includes some
lines from The Picture; or the Lover’s Resolution: “Then all the charm
/ Is broken—all that phantom world so fair / Vanishes, and a
thousand circlets spread, . . . Stay awhile, / Poor youth! . . . The
visions will return!” All he can do now is offer the reader a fragment
of the account he intended, “describing with equal fidelity the dream
of pain and disease.” That fragment is the poem, “Kubla Khan.” The
poem can be read as an interpretation of the poetic process itself, in
which the power of creativity is at war with the poet’s anxiety that he
is too late, that other poets have already said the same thing.
From the first two lines of the first stanza, Khan is portrayed as a
ruler in complete control over his domain, not unlike an artist who
believes in the strength of his own creative power. Khan has full legal
authority to command the construction of his own palace: “In
Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree.” The rest
of this first stanza is a lush description of the landscape in Xanadu,
yet at the same time the stanza contains intense images of enclosure,
defensiveness, and the need to protect this world from outside
intrusion. The luxurious construction seems to be inaccessible to

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mere mortals. However, here the poet may abide in a world arranged
by his own fancy; he has gained access to this otherwise inaccessible
world through the power of imagination. “Where Alph, the sacred
river ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless
sea. / So twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers
were girdled round.” Whether we read the poem from the point of
view of Khan the ruler, or from the perspective of the triumphant
poetic voice, this imaginative space is full of tension, anxiety, and the
fear of invasion (either by the outside world or by the spirit of poetic
forebears who have already had the final word). Thus, Xanadu
begins to emerge as a fortress, or perhaps even as a prison for those
who reside within its inviolable walls. “So twice five miles of fertile
ground, / With walls and towers were girdled round.” Above all else,
however, Coleridge sets forth the dynamics of poetic competition: he
will compete with Khan to construct a far lovelier paradise than the
one of which he has just read.
In the second stanza, the “incense-bearing tree” and “sunny spots
of greenery” of the first stanza are transformed into a frightening
terrain, “[a] savage place! as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a
waning moon was haunted.” This stanza bears many resemblances to
the world of medieval romance. First, the enchanted forest, with all
its magic and danger, is an important topos in the Arthurian legend.
Furthermore, the waning moon has always been a powerful symbol
of femininity, and is yet another version of the “woman wailing for
her demon lover.”
The presence of these two images have profound consequences for
our interpretation of the poem. To begin with, the moon, which
presides over nature and affects the ebb and tide of the ocean, is here
“waning.” This image of fading power describes far more than just
the night; it also makes a statement about the diminution of creative
potency. With respect to the wailing woman, the inclusion of this
element of medieval romance becomes a strong statement that the
woman’s chances of being united with her lover are hopeless, for the
medieval romantic convention mandates that love must be forever
unrequited in order to perpetuate the relentless quest for fulfillment.
These images of suspended animation/imagination are the poet’s
worst nightmare; he fears his creativity has come to an end.
Furthermore, just as this nightmare rings the poetic death knell, a
violent upheaval occurs and all hope collapses. “A mighty fountain

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momently was forced: amid whose swift half-intermitted burst /
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.”
Finally, there is also a Chaucerian (and therefore medieval)
allusion to the garrulous eagle who advises the poet, Geoffrey
Chaucer, to ignore the chaff and write of the corn, to get rid of the
debris left by the thresher, the “chaffy grain” (here, the poetic
predecessor) and write of the kernel or essential vision of poetic
truth. And so the stanza ends with “[a]ncestral voices prophesying
war! / The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the
waves.” If the poem is read as a “tour” through the often treacherous,
yet thrilling and fantastic realm of the imagination, then the poetic
predecessors have returned to compete with the living poet.
The third stanza concerns Coleridge’s vision of the Abyssinian
maid. Critics have debated whether this last stanza is connected to
the other two—or if in fact this second vision is merely a fragment
of another poem. If the poet intended it to be understood as a new
vision, then its primary distinction from the “dream vision” of the
pleasure dome is that the poet is now fully awake and conscious. The
vision is born out of the great cataclysm of the preceding stanza in
which “the dome of pleasure” has sunk “in tumult to a lifeless
ocean.” The sensual effects of this newly-created paradise are far
more aural than visual, and the sounds that emanate from the
dulcimer are much softer and very different from the sounds of the
fountain in the second stanza, “[a]mid whose swift half-intermitted
burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.” Indeed, the
dulcimer’s music is nothing less than a “symphony.” Most
significantly, the Abyssinian maid sings of Mount Abora, an allusion
to Book IV of Paradise Lost. The poet is acknowledging both his
wish to follow in Milton’s footsteps and his fear that it may not be
possible, for Coleridge posits that thought as desire rather than an
absolute certainty: “Could I revive within me / Her symphony and
song / . . . I would build that dome in air.” The poet ends on an
ambiguous note, his work a fragment of creative imagination that
reaches no final conclusion. 

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 Critical Views on
“Kubla Khan”
ANTHONY JOHN HARDING ON COLERIDGE’S
MYTHMAKING
[Anthony John Harding is the author of The Reception of
Myth in English Romanticism and Milton, the Metaphysicals
and Romanticism. In the excerpt below from the chapter
entitled “Beyond Mythology,” Harding discusses “Kubla
Khan” in the context of Coleridge’s mythmaking.
Coleridge’s creation of an ambiguous landscape, the core of
which can be located in the Christian tradition, Harding
sees as an attempt to break down the barriers between the
sacred and the profane.]
The Mariner’s emergence into the post-mythological era has been a
traumatic one, and his psychic scars remain with him. Though he
has unselfconsciously created the mythology which brought him
self-knowledge and a degree of freedom, he is not yet master of it.
He remains the unwilling object of daemonic possession, . . .
limping along the road to the Enlightenment vision of perfected
humanity.
“Kubla Khan” presents us with a similarly ambivalent portrait.
The first thirty-six lines of the poem encapsulate the mythic
constructs of the Orient: neither haphazard antiquarianism nor an
unprecedented attack of the collective unconscious can be credited
with responsibility for this narrative. After Elinor Shaffer’s lucid
demonstration of the ferment of syncretistic thought that lay behind
“Kubla Khan,” it should no longer be possible to take seriously
explanations of the poem based on pathology or associative
psychology; nor, more important still, should we continue to refer to
Coleridge’s mind as consisting of a pagan half which possessed all
the creativity and a Christian half which acted as his “orthodox
censor.”
As a Christian in an age which already stood outside mythology,
which looked back on it as on a road previously travelled (or, to use
Campbell’s metaphor, as the womb from which it had emerged),
Coleridge understood that the poet’s task must now be to survey

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mythology from above: to claim it as a dynamic heritage, not as the
exhausted fictions derided by Voltaire. “Coleridge’s transcendental
enterprise was to lay bare the source of mythology, the sense for a
God in the human race.”
While Shaffer is surely right to summarize in this way the impulse
from which “Kubla Khan” sprang, we have to recognize that her
work has raised in acute form all the problems associated with
demythologization and its close relative in literary criticism,
secularization. Modern humanistic scholarship sometimes tends to
overlook the fact that at the very centre of Christian tradition lies
the most potent of all images for the overthrow of hieratic religion
and the release of the sacred into common experience: the rending
of the veil of the temple. For the Christian poet there are grounds for
believing that any barriers which once existed between the sacred
and the profane have been thrown down. The Atonement or
reuniting (at-one-ment) of God and humankind implies that (in
Frye’s words) “a channel of communication between the divine and
human is now open.” Yet such a statement at once involves the
recollection of a historical event—and therefore of the poet’s own
position in historical time, his fallibility and his finitude. A
disturbing infiltration of the anagogical into the historical, thoughts
of the end of all things into the image of an existing realized
perfection, is an undeniable feature of “Kubla Khan,” as it is of the
thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, in which the primary
Imagination is held to be a repetition, in the finite mind, of the
eternal, divine act of creation and is echoed by the secondary
Imagination or poetic power, which coexists with the conscious will.
Here, too, the process of recreating and unifying sometimes appears
to be threatened by a counter-tendency within the secondary
Imagination itself towards dissolution: “It dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered
impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.”
Lawrence Kramer notes the same pattern of dissolution followed
by recreation in “Kubla Khan”: the woman wailing for her demon-
lover, for erotic possession by an unknown primal other, and who
thus personifies the “daemonic” aspect of Coleridgean imagination,
is transmuted and taken up into the healing, idealized figure of the
Abyssinian maid. Kramer’s purpose in pointing out the similarity is
“to link the daemonic imagination . . . with the romantic

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imagination of the Biographia Literaria,” arguing the “the daemonic,
in Romantic poems, rarely appears without generating a later
appearance of its romantic contrary, which then proceeds to
transcend, transform, or evade the daemonic vision.”
—Anthony John Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985): pp. 50–52.

CARL R. WOODRING ON THE POEM’S POLITICAL

CONTEXT
[Carl R. Woodring is a well-known scholar and has written
several books on the Romantic and Victorian periods. His
books include Politics in English Romantic Poetry (1970) and
Nature Into Art: Cultural Transformations in Nineteenth-
Century Britain (1989). In the excerpt below from his 1961
book Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge, Woodring, citing
both historical and biographical facts, discusses the political
context of “Kubla Khan,” suggesting that the poem can be
interpreted as an expression of Coleridge’s distaste for
luxury and political ambition.]
His distaste for the luxury and ambition of princes may help to
explain Kubla Khan. He has clearly erected in that poem an
antithesis between the measured and the measureless, the sunny and
the sunless, the pleasure-dome and the deep romantic chasm, the
pleasurable and the sacred, the decree of Kubla Khan and the
prophecy amid tumult. Kubla said, Let there be a dome, and there
was a dome. “But oh!” he heard from far “Ancestral voices
prophesying war!” Setting aside the poles of drunken and sober
Freudianism, critical analyses of the poem divide basically over
attitudes toward the eastern potentate. Is the poem for Kubla or
against him? Or, as possible but unlikely, does it lean neither for nor
against? We need to resolve this point before we can declare Kubla
the symbol of a poet decreeing the thing of beauty in his
imagination, instead of a temporal lord creating in a mode less
durable than the poet’s mode opposed to it. Coleridge certainly in
1796, and almost certainly in 1798 or 1799, would have been against

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Kubla’s presumption. If he associated the dome of his poem with
wealth and pleasure, as well as with a potentate, he would condemn
the dome rather than the supernatural forces that threaten it.
Purchas, his most immediate source, called it “a sumptuous house of
pleasure.” By the term “a Pleasure house,” in a letter of May, 1799, to
Thomas Poole, Coleridge refers to some kind of love-nest where a
German subaltern killed his mistress and then himself. To arrive at
this nest, the officer “made a pleasure party in a Sledge with a
woman with whom he lived in criminal connection.” The German
account that Coleridge seems to be summarizing contains no direct
suggestion of either a “pleasure party” or a “Pleasure house.” It is an
odd coincidence, if it is nothing more, that Leigh Hunt thought he
remembered a variation of the opening lines of the poem in which
Kubla Khan did “A stately pleasure-house ordain.”
Catherine herself may hover malignly near. Kubla’s “sunny
pleasure-dome with caves of ice” may possibly not be constructed
even partly of ice; its glamor may be enhanced merely by proximity
to natural “caves of ice.” But the “bubble of ice” in Cashmere, noted
by Coleridge for use in his proposed hymn to the moon and
considered by J. L. Lowes a direct source for Kubla Khan, is no nearer
to the dome and its setting in the poem than a pleasure-dome, itself
of ice, decreed in a despotic whim by Empress Anna, a notable
predecessor of Catherine, shortly before her death in 1740. Her ice-
palace, “stately” in its perverse way, may have had a strong influence
on the poem. It was “the work of man,” admired, unnatural, and
unworthy, as William Cowper described and condemned it for his
contemporaries—and Coleridge’s—in Book V of The Task. Cannons
of ice had fired metal balls when the Empress forced a courtier in
disfavor to marry and to display himself with his ugly bride naked
on a bed of ice in the mock-palace. English interest in these cold
games began about 1770, when Hume edited a translation of
General Manstein’s Memoirs of Russia. In 1778 John Glen King
published A Letter to . . . the Lord Bishop of Durham . . . With a View
of the Flying Mountains of Zarsko Sello near St. Petersbourg, including
a fold-out illustration of the pleasurable device of “flying
mountains”: over artificial mounds of snow, each hollowed for a
grotto, the Empress Elizabeth and her guests (and later Catherine
and hers) rode in elaborate toboggans, which a machine worked by
horses then drew to the pleasure-hut on the highest mound, in

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preparation for the next gay adventure. Naturally the almost iceless
English were impressed.
Coleridge could not have failed to know of the Empress’ ice-
palace, however incorrectly he may have remembered for the
Biographia Literaria that he had made a contumelious reference to it
in an essay of 1793: “During my first Cambridge vacation, I assisted
a friend in a contribution for a literary society in Devonshire: and in
this I remember to have compared Darwin’s work to the Russian
palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory.” In the agony of his love
for Sara Hutchinson, perhaps in 1805, he asked if true love were not
of more worth than beauty, wealth, or family. His words are these, in
the third stanza of Separation:
Is not true Love of higher price
Than outward Form, though fair to see,
Wealth’s glittering fairy-dome of ice,
Or echo of proud ancestry?—
—Carl R. Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1961): pp. 49–51.

DAVID PERKINS ON THE UNITY BETWEEN THE PROSE

PREFACE AND THE POEM
[David Perkins is a well-known scholar who has written
extensively on the Romantic poets. His books include
Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity and The Quest for
Permanence. In the excerpt below from his article, “The
Imaginative Vision of ‘Kubla Khan’: On Coleridge’s
Introductory Note,” Perkins discusses the unity between the
prose preface and the actual poem, a unity which is often
overlooked by other critics. Perkins sees the introductory
note as the creation of the first of two myths, the theme of
poetic inspiration and its irretrievable loss attributed to the
mysterious intruder from Porlock.]
Coleridge’s introductory note to Kubla Khan weaves together two
myths with potent imaginative appeal. The myth of the lost poem

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tells how an inspired work was mysteriously given to the poet and
then dispelled irrecoverably. The nonexistent lines haunt the
imagination more than any actual poem could. John Livingston
Lowes used to tell his classes, W. Jackson Bate remembers, “If there is
any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn,
and quartered, it is the man on business from Porlock.” . . . The
note describes the poet as a solitary, a dreamer, and a reader of
curious lore, such as Purchas His Pilgrimage. He is not portrayed as a
habitual taker of drugs but rather the opposite: an “anodyne” had
been prescribed for an illness and had the profound effect the note
describes because, as the reader is supposed to infer, Coleridge was
not used to the drug. But the motif of being drugged is also part of
the symboliste myth of the poet. Only to a poet of this kind,
withdrawn in dreams and uncertain in his inspiration, could the
person from Porlock be a serious intrusion. That the man from
Porlock comes “on business” is also typical of the symboliste ethos, in
which ordinary life and “business” were viewed as antithetical to
poetry.
How the introductory note should be printed has not been much
discussed, but editors have disagreed in practice. In popular
anthologies it may be omitted altogether. If it is, the poem may not
be read with the assumption that it is unfinished, particularly when,
as is generally done, the editor also deletes Coleridge’s 1834 subtitle,
“Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.” Since in Romantic poetry
“Vision,” “Dream,” and “Fragment” are practically genres, a reader’s
experience of the poem must be quite different when the
expectations evoked by these terms are not activated. . . .
My purpose in this essay is to inquire what difference it makes.
The introductory note guides our reading of the poem from start to
finish. Without it, most readers would interpret the poem as
asserting the power and potential sublimity of the poet, who can be
compared to the great Khan. With the introductory note, this
assertion is still present, but it is strongly undercut; the poem
becomes richer and more complex, and the theme of lost inspiration
is much more heavily weighted. Since many critics have stressed that
the introductory note apologizes for the poem and minimizes its
significance, there is no need to dwell further on these points.
Instead, I shall emphasize that the introductory note gives the poem
a plot it would not otherwise have, indicates genres to which the

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poem belongs, and presents images and themes that interrelate with
those in the poem.
In previous articles and books, the only critics who have discussed
the problems I take up are Irene H. Chayes, Kathleen M. Wheeler,
and Jean-Pierre Mileur. For Chayes, the introductory note is a
“literary invention” that “serves as an improvised argument” of the
poem; it informs the reader that “the unacknowledged point of
view” in the first thirty-six lines of the poem “is that of a man asleep,
probably dreaming”; and it offers a “general structural parallel” to
the poem, since in both the introductory note and the poem “poetic
composition of one kind occurs in the past but in some way is
imperfect, and poetic composition of another kind is planned for
the future but remains unachieved.” Wheeler agrees with Chayes that
the introductory note is “a highly literary piece of composition” and
that it has thematic similarities to the last eighteen lines of the poem.
She thinks that the speaker of the introductory note is not to be
taken as Coleridge but as a literal-minded and naive persona whom
Coleridge creates “as a model to the reader of how not to respond to
the poem.” Once the reader recognizes himself in the persona,
Wheeler argues, he feels a revulsion and becomes more imaginative
and perceptive. Since Coleridge intended all this, his ironic
representation of himself in the persona as a “laughing-stock” was “a
gesture of incalculable generosity.” She arrives at this theory because
she wants to make the introductory note analogous to the glosses of
the Ancient Mariner. Mileur also believes that the introductory note
is a “self-conscious fiction” with literary quality. It “constitutes an
interpretation of the poem” and itself “cries out for interpretation.”
He makes specific suggestions to which I am indebted, but his
interest is less in the relation of the introductory note to the poem
than in general issues this relation poses or illustrates—
“immanence” and “presence” versus “revision” and “belatedness.”
—David Perkins, “The Imaginative Vision of ‘Kubla Khan’: On
Coleridge’s Introductory Note.” In Coleridge, Keats, and the
Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream, eds. J. Robert Barth,
S.J., and John L. Mahoney (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1990): pp. 97–99.

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CLAIRE MILLER COLOMBO ON POETIC FORM
[Claire Miller Colombo is the author of the article “This
Pen of Mine Will Say Too Much: Public Performance in the
Journals of Anna Larpent.” In the excerpt below from her
article “Reading Scripture, Writing Self: Coleridge’s
Animation of the ‘Dead Letter’” Colombo argues that in
“Kubla Khan” Coleridge seems to have considered poetic
form as derivative of scriptural form. She discusses the
ensuing tensions created by that perspective.]
Like “The Eolian Harp,” “Kubla Khan” experiments with imaginative
absolutism. But while the former poem positively affirms the value
of relationality and hope, the latter does so negatively by exploring
the conditions of alienation and fear. “The Eolian Harp”’s economy
of ownership based on exchange is transmuted in “Kubla Khan” into
an economy of ownership based on self-inflation. The final
moments of “The Eolian Harp” find the speaker valuing his
possessions because they have issued from God and will ultimately
return to God: to possess is to anticipate surrender to the
communal. But in “Kubla Khan” the mock-symbolic garden and
pleasure dome, unlike the mock-symbolic harp, are not relinquished
by their owner, Khan. Rather, they are appropriated by the poet-
figure himself, who claims dominion over all dimensions of the
poem—internally, the landscape and the visionary force that shapes
it, and externally, the reader who experiences the poem and must
regard the poet-figure with “holy dread.” “The Eolian Harp”’s
anticipated surrender to God is replaced in “Kubla Khan” by the
poet-figure’s surrender to self.
Along with “Christabel” (Part I) and “The Ancient Mariner,”
Coleridge creates “Khan” during a period of financial and moral
desperation. In October 1797 he complains that “I suppose that at
last I must become a Unitarian minister as a less evil than
starvation.” In early 1798 he is spared this “evil” by accepting the
Wedgwood annuity. Coleridge justifies his ultimate acceptance of the
annuity by regarding the arrangement as a form of exchange; he
writes to Poole in January, 1798 that “I long to be at home with you,
and to settle, and persevere in, some mode of repaying the
Wedgwoods thro’ the medium of Mankind.” Whether such a
medium of reparation is, as Basil Willey calls it, “high-minded

108
casuistry” or genuine Christian beneficence is debatable, but
Coleridge’s acceptance of the offer is clearly motivated by both
religious principle and artistic practice. Coleridge first declined the
Wedgwoods’ offer on the grounds that “I could by means of your
kindness subsist for the two next years, & enjoy leisure & external
comfort. But anxiety for the future would remain & increase, as it is
probable my children will come fast on me.” Accepting the second
offer may indeed have incited in the poet some degree of guilt, or at
least apprehension: indefinite “leisure & external comfort,” free of
charge, could easily cultivate Khan-like tendencies. Writing the
poem, then, may have been for Coleridge a preventive measure;
imagining the solipsistic extreme of his new artistic and financial
freedom was perhaps negative self-encouragement to “defend that
cause to which I have solemnly devoted my best efforts . . . and, as I
have received the gospel freely, freely to give it.”

If “Kubla Khan” was an exorcism of the version of himself the

poet feared—the self that received without giving—it is
understandable that the poem remained unpublished until 1816.
But why was it published at that time? Walter Bate, taking at face
value Coleridge’s 1816 labeling of the poem as a “psychological
curiosity” rather than worthy poetry, casts Coleridge as a poetic
weakling motivated by practical circumstance and the
condescending request of the then-celebrated Byron: “Timidly, as he
tried to get some practical use out of what he had written earlier, he
escorted it, as he was to escort so much by that time, with a cloud of
apology.” But 1816–17 was the period during which Coleridge wrote
The Statesman’s Manual and the Lay Sermons, some of his most
pointed affirmations of vital, Christian philosophy over mechanistic
Spinozan philosophy. He was also revising “The Eolian Harp” for
inclusion in Sibylline Leaves (1817). Given the pious mood and
substance of the works Coleridge produced during this time, it
seems possible that the publication of “Kubla Khan” was strategic
rather than accidental—that Coleridge sought to get some homiletic
mileage out of what, for the 1798 poet, may have been heretical,
nihilistic poetry. In the context of Coleridge’s later works, the poem
is no longer a transgression but an injunction against transgression;
it is, in the language of the accompanying preface, the inverse yet
“parallel production of the correspondent expressions” of
Coleridge’s mature prose. Both forewarn against the hazards of

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Mammon-worship, the dangers of secular, counterfeit symbolism,
and alienation from the organic, divine symbolism of scripture.
—Claire Miller Colombo, “Reading Scripture, Writing Self:
Coleridge’s Animation of the ‘Dead Letter,’” Studies in Romanticism
35, no. 1 (Spring 1996): pp. 43–45.

KATHLEEN WHEELER ON THE POEM’S RELATION TO

18TH-CENTURY GARDEN CONCEPTS
[Kathleen Wheeler is a well-known critic and the author of
several books on Romanticism, including The Creative
Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (1981) and Romanticism,
Pragmatism and Deconstruction (1993). In the excerpt below
from her article “‘Kubla Khan’ and Eighteenth Century
Aesthetic Theories,” Wheeler discusses the poem within the
context of that centur y’s interest in gardens, most
particularly the popular Chinese garden, and its significance
to debates on the nature of artistic inspiration and
mechanical versus organic concepts of nature.]
Few poems of classic status in the English literary corpus seem more
exotic to the modern reader than “Kubla Khan.” Coleridge’s tantalising
account of its origins combines with the Oriental imagery to tend to
disassociate the poem from its literary tradition. The perhaps
surprising conclusion persists however that if ever a poem reflected
the concerns and interests of its age, “Kubla Khan” is that poem. Yet
the works on sources has acted both to obscure and to reveal the
exemplary nature of the poem. For it has located many coincidences
of idea, imagery and phrase in travelogues, histories, religious myths,
and Oriental literature generally, without emphasising sufficiently (to
overcome the strangeness to a modern reader) the extent to which
much of this material had already been assimilated into the English
literary tradition in the eighteenth century, and already constituted
exciting and well-known speculations of the day.
Johnson’s Rasselas is a work which helps to indicate how
commonplace and familiar in English literature Oriental imagery,

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with its earthly paradises and exotic guests had become. Published in
1759, Rasselas won immediate success in the contemporary climate
of Persian Tales and Arabian Nights. Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World
(1762) is another of the most obvious and important cases, in spite
of its critical, satiric mode, as is Beckford’s Vathek (1786) which
Byron was later to praise unrestrainedly and draw upon extensively.
It is also clear that Coleridge unequivocally rejected the moralising
“improvements” to the Oriental tale of Addison, Steele, Johnson,
Hawkesworth, and Ridley, and he probably would have also have felt
the pseudophilosophizing spirit of Rasselas and Voltaire’s Zadig
(1749) to be at cross purposes with the Oriental Tale. On the other
hand, he would have sympathised with the satires of Walpole and
Goldsmith on the author-translators of the numerous pseudo-tales.
For Coleridge’s own adept use of prefaces (and glosses) mimics
often ironically the technique of authors’ and translators’ prefaces of
many of the collections of Oriental Tales or English adaptations; he
also realised how effective these techniques were in intensifying
poetic illusion by projecting the origin and authorship of the tale
into some distant and unknown time and country, or into some
unusual state of mind. He wove a framework technique into the
verse structure of his own poems, either explicitly as in “The Ancient
Mariner,” or in the form of a radical change in the narrative
perspective, as in stanza iv of “Kubla Khan,” thus imitating the
Chinese-box structure of many tales. He thereby drew attention to
the role of the story-teller in both poems, as was done so effectively
in Arabian Nights. He also often made unity of apparently
disconnected images an explicit issue, as in the preface to “Kubla
Khan.” And he preserved the action of the poems well outside the
realm of reality or possibility (as he ironically owned to Mrs.
Barbauld). This Coleridgean kind of supernaturalism became
moreover the direct mode of displaying imaginative symbol-
making, or what we call “figuration” (the production of figures of
speech) at its most universally representative, that is, in its form
most free from any dogmatic or didactic purposes and consequently
effective for instruction in the way appropriate to art, that is by
means of delight. Finally, as will be discussed below, Coleridge
showed how exotic and even extravagant imagery could be used in
the service of that “educt of the imagination,” the symbol, in order to
direct the mind, first, towards the idea and the intelligential in and
through the use of the sensuous, and, second, towards a self-

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consciousness about the mind’s own processes and nature, which for
Coleridge always constituted the genuine unity of a work of art.
The exploration of such a “unifying idea” as self-conscious
awareness of the importance of figuration, toward which the
imagery of “Kubla Khan” leads, can also be considered in the light of
the less literary and more theoretical background of the aesthetic
controversies raging in the eighteenth century. Dryden, Pope, Locke,
Edmund Burke, John Baillie, Johnson and others contributed to the
issues which were hotly debated, such as the relative value of
painting and poetry, the nature of the sublime, the distinction
between copy and imitation, the nature of genius, the analysis of
language as literal or inherently metaphorical, and the role of
rhetoric and emotion in poetry. This more theoretical direction is
best approached by means of a brief excursus into the image of the
garden in its eighteenth century context.
In addition to reflecting the interest in travels, foreign (and
especially Oriental) cultures, fantastic speculations about the Nile,
the cosmos, origins of man, the first language, and mysterious
eastern cults of wisdom and religion (all of which were topics
popular throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries),
“Kubla Khan” also explicitly reflects the widespread interest in
gardens, and particularly the oriental or “Chinese Garden” whose
design was actually imported into the grounds of stately homes
throughout England. However strange it may seem to the modern
reader or poet, gardening was a subject worthy of discourses and
poems by the most eminent writers, and was eagerly read about by
an interested reading public. . . .
The movement of “Kubla Khan” from the formal geometric
garden of the seventeenth century to the suggestions of a more
natural garden towards the end of stanza i (“forests ancient as the
hills,” and so on), and finally towards the wild and natural scene of
stanza ii, seems to chart this gradual change in interest throughout
the previous century and a half. It had of course its symbolic
counterpart in the eighteenth century dispute of the nature of
genius as dominated by a reasoning, measuring, analytical faculty or,
alternatively, guided by a faculty of intuition, which was mysterious
and acted according to its own, unknown, internal principles. Thus
the garden symbol had its application in a theory of aesthetics as
well as in a religious or moral sphere. Artifice was set up against

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inspiration, conscious against unconscious, and the mechanical
against the organic. It was perhaps in the light of these eighteenth
century controversies that Wordsworth formulated his theory of a
return to natural feeling and the language of the common man.
—Kathleen Wheeler, “‘Kubla Khan’ and Eighteenth Century Aesthetic
Theories,” The Wordsworth Circle 22, no. 1 (Winter 1991): pp. 15, 16.

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 Works by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lectures on Politics and Religion. 1795.
The Watchman. 1796.
Religious Musings. 1796.
Osorio. 1797.
Lyrical Ballads (with William Wordsworth). 1798. (second edition, 1800)
Wallenstein, a translation of Schiller. 1799–1800.
The Friend: A Series of Essays to Aid in the Formation of Fixed Principles
in Politics, Morals and Religion. With Literary Amusements Interspersed.
1809–1810.
Remorse: A Tragedy in Five Acts. 1813.
Statesman’s Manual. 1816.
Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and
Opinions. 1817
The Philosophical Lectures. 1818–1819.
Lay Sermons. 1825.
Aids to Reflection. 1825.
Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. 1829.
On the Constitution of Church and State. 1829
Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a collection of
private conversations recorded by his nephew and literary executor,
Henry N. Coleridge). 1835.
The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1871–1878.
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1970.
Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and
Unpublished Prose Writings. 1979.
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 3 volumes, 1794–1826.

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 Works About
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Adair, Patricia M. The Waking Dream: A Study of Coleridge’s Poetry.
London: Edward Arnold, 1967.
Barth, J. Robert. Coleridge and the Power of Love. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1988.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Coleridge. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
Beer, John B. Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence. New York: Barnes & Noble
Books, 1977.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.
Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of
Imagination. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.
Boulger, James. Coleridge as Religious Thinker. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1961.
Bygrave, Stephen. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Plymouth, England:
Northcote House, 1997.
Christensen, Jerome. Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Coburn, Kathleen. Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Dekker, George. Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility. New York:
Barnes & Noble Books, 1978.
Fields, Beverly. Reality’s Dark Dream: Dejection in Coleridge. Kent, Ohio:
Kent State University Press, 1967.
Ford, Jennifer. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the
Medical Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Fruman, Norman. Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel. New York: G.
Braziller, 1971.
Fulford, Tim. Coleridge’s Figurative Language. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1991.
Gallant, Christine. Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination Today. New York:
AMS Press, 1989.

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Gravil, Richard, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe, eds. Coleridge’s
Imagination: Essays in Memory of Peter Laver. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
Hamilton, Paul. Coleridge’s Poetics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1983.
Harding, Anthony J. Coleridge and the Idea of Love: Aspects of
Relationship in Coleridge’s Thought and Writing. London, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1974.
———. Coleridge and the Inspired Word. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1985.
Hill, John Spencer. A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the Major
Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1984.
Hodgson, John A. Coleridge, Shelley and Transcendental Inquiry:
Rhetoric, Argument, Metapsychology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions. New York: Viking, 1990.
———. Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: Harper Collins, 1998.
Keane, Patrick J. Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and
Robinson Crusoe. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994.
Kearns, Sheila M. Coleridge, Wordsworth and Romantic Biography:
Reading Strategies of Self-Representation. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1995.
Kessler, Edward. Coleridge’s Metaphors of Being. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1979.
Lefebure, Molly. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium. London:
Gollancz, 1974.
Lockridge, Laurence. Coleridge the Moralist. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1977.
Magnuson, Paul. Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Marks, Emerson R. Coleridge on the Language of Verse. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1981.
Modiano, Raimonda. Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. Tallahassee:
Florida State University Press, 1985.

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Newlyn, Lucy. Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Paley, Morton D. Coleridge’s Later Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996.
Parker, Reeve. Coleridge’s Meditative Art. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1975.
Prickett, Stephen. Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Rookmaaker, H. R. Towards a Romantic Conception of Nature:
Coleridge’s Poetry Up to 1903, a Study in the History of Ideas.
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984.
Simpson, David. Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry. London:
Macmillan, 1979.
Stillinger, Jack. Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of
the Major Poems. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Taylor, Anya. Coleridge’s Defense of the Human. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1986.
Walsh, William. Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance. London: Chatto
& Windus, 1967.
Wheeler, Kathleen M. The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

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 Index of
Themes and Ideas
BIOGRAPHICA LITERARIA, 14
“CHRISTABEL,” 13, 58–78, 108; Bard Barcy in, 61; Baron in, 60–61, 62;
carnivalization of, 70–71; Christabel in, 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 63, 64,
65–68, 69, 70, 73–78; Christabel’s ambiguity in, 65–68; Christabel’s
disturbed sleep in, 61, 74–78; and Cinderella folktale, 63–64; and
Coleridge’s indecisiveness in regards to Geraldine, 71–74; critical views
on, 63–65, 92; dog in, 58; feminine landscape in, 59; Geraldine in,
59–60, 61–62, 71–74, 75, 76, 77, 78; incest in, 63–65; infant son in, 62;
and King Lear, 63–65; language in, 66; Leoline in, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69,
70; psychoanalytic interpretation of, 65–68; Roland in, 61; sexual guilt
in, 73–74; sources of, 58, 63–64; thematic analysis of, 58–62; as verse
drama and Gothic parody, 58–59, 68–71, 72, 74; witchcraft in, 77–78
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, biography of, 11–14
“DEJECTION: AN ODE,” 13, 79–97; ambiguity of, 95–97; continuity in,
87–90; critical views on, 9, 84–97; and decline of Coleridge’s poetic
imagination, 79, 81, 85, 87–90, 95–97; and disillusioned love, 79,
81–82; formal elements and intention in, 90–92; and “The Garden of
Boccaccio,” 92–95; life-in-death experiences in, 81, 91; light in, 82;
moon in, 86, 87, 88, 92; and nature, 81, 82, 87–90, 95–97; and ode,
79–81, 83, 84–87, 95; rhyme-scheme in, 86; and The Tempest, 82;
thematic analysis of, 79–83; wind in, 86–87, 89
“EOLIAN HARP, THE,” 49, 108, 109
“FEARS IN SOLITUDE,” 49, 50
“FRANCE: AN ODE,” 34, 35, 49, 50
“FROST AT MIDNIGHT,” 13, 38–57; and big metropolis, 40, 42–45;
Christianity in, 41; as conversation poem, 38–39, 47, 49; critical views
on, 9, 42–57, 91; domesticity in, 54–57; fire in, 40; and French
Revolution, 42–45; Gothic elements in, 51–54; imagination in, 38,
39–41, 45–48; infant son in, 40–41, 44, 45–47; invasion of Britain in,
54–57; nature in, 39–41, 56–57; political context of, 48–51, 54–57;
stranger in, 53–54; supernatural in, 38; symbol in, 38; thematic analysis
of, 38–41; time and weather in, 55–57; wind in, 39; and Wordsworth’s
understanding of Coleridge, 42–45

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“GARDEN OF BOCCACCIO, THE,” 92–95
“KUBLA KHAN,” 13, 98–113; Abyssinian maid in, 100, 102; and
Coleridge’s distaste for luxury and political ambition, 103–5; and
Coleridge’s mythmaking, 101–3; critical views on, 9, 92, 101–13; and
decline of Coleridge’s poetic imagination, 9–10, 98, 99, 102, 105–7;
eagle in, 100; and eighteenth century garden concepts, 110–13; Khan
in, 98–99, 103–4; and medieval romance, 99; and Milton, 100; moon
in, 99; nature in, 99, 110–12; and poetic form, 108–10; political context
of, 103–5; and scriptural form, 108–10; sources of, 98, 104–5; thematic
analysis of, 98–100; unity between prose preface and poem of, 105–7,
111; Xanadu in, 98, 99
LAY SERMONS, 109
“LIME-TREE BOWER, THE,” 49, 92
LYRICAL BALLADS, 15, 52, 68, 72, 77
“ODE TO THE DEPARTING YEAR,” 84
“ODE TO TRANQUILITY,” 84
“PINDARICK,” 84
“RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, THE,” 13, 15–37, 108; albatross
in, 16, 17, 19, 26, 27, 34–35; as allegory, 15, 33; Christianity in, 16, 26,
30, 32, 34; critical views on, 9, 22–37, 72, 81, 92, 101, 111; domesticity
in, 30–32; editor in, 28–30; emotional effects of, 22–24; environment
of, 17; and French Revolution, 24–27; Gothic elements in, 15; guilt in,
25, 26–27; harlot in, 32; Hermit in, 20; and humanity’s relationship
with nature, 17–18, 23, 35–37; and imagination, 10; life-in-death
experiences in, 17–18, 19, 32, 34; margin notes in, 29, 30–31; Mariner
in, 16, 17–21, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34–35, 101; and motivation for writing, 15;
origin of metaphor of, 33; relationship of individual to culture in,
33–35; science in, 19; spiritual renewal in, 18–20, 21, 26–27;
supernatural in, 17, 19, 25, 28; thematic analysis of, 15–21; wedding
ceremony in, 16, 30–32, 34; Wedding-Guest in, 16, 18, 19, 20–21,
28–30, 34; wind in, 20, 23–24; Wordsworth’s contributions to, 15–16
STATESMAN’S MANUAL, THE, 109

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